The expansion of England

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EXPANSION OF ENGLAND

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THE

EXPANSION OF ENGLAND

TWO COURSES OF LECTURES

BY

Sir J. R. SEELEY, K.C.M.G., Litt.D.

EEOnJS PEOFESSOB OF MODERN fflSTORT IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

FELLOW OF GONVILLE AND CAICS COLLEGE ; FELLOW OF THE ROYAL

HISTORICAL SOCIETY, AND HONORARY MEMBER OF THE

HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MASSACHUSETTS

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWX, AND COMPANY

1905

All rights reserved

LIBRARY
VNiYEU-r. M TALIFORN]
SANTA BARBARA

PREFACE

In preparing these lectures for the press I
have been much indebted to Professor Cowell,
who was good enough to take an interest in
that part of them which relates to India, and
to Mr. Cunningham, the author of that most
interesting book, The Growth of English Indiistry
and Commerce.

CONTENTS

COURSE I
LECTURE I

PAGE

Tendency in English History . , . 1

LECTURE II
England in the Eighteenth Century . . 20

LECTURE III
The Empire ...... 44

LECTURE IV
The Old Colonial System . . . .66

LECTURE V
Effect of the New "World on the Old . . 90

LECTURE VI
Commerce and War ..... 114

LECTURE VII
Phases of Expansion ..... 138

LECTURE VIII
Schism in Greater Britain .... 164

VIU THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND

COUESE II

LECTURE I

PAGE

History and Politics ..... 189

LECTURE II
The Indian Empire ..... 207

LECTURE III
How WE Conquered India .... 228

LECTURE IV
How WE Govern India ... 251

LECTURE V
Mutual Influence of England and India . 272

LECTURE VI
Phases in the Conquest of India . . , 294

LECTURE VII
Internal and External Dangers . . . 317

LECTURE VIII
Recapitulation ...... 340

FIRST COURSE

LECTUEE I

TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY

It is a favourite maxim of mine that history, while it
should be scientific in its method, should pursue a
practical object. That is, it should not merely gratify
the reader's curiosity about the past, but modify his
view of the present and his forecast of the future.
Now if this maxim be sound, the history of England
ought to end with something that might be called a
moral. Some large conclusion ought to arise out of
it ; it ought to exhibit the general tendency of English
affairs in such a way as to set us thinking about the
future and divining the destiny which is reserved for
us. The more so because the part played by our
country in the world certainly does not grow less
prominent as history advances. Some countries, such
as Holland and Sweden, might pardonably regard
their history as in a manner wound up. They were
once great, but the conditions of their greatness have
passed away, and they now hold a secondary place.
& B

2 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

Their interest in their own past is therefore either
sentimental or purely scientific; the only practical
lesson of their history is a lesson of resignation.
But England has grown steadily greater and greater,
absolutely at least if not always relatively. It is far
greater now than it was in the eighteenth century ;
it was far greater in the eighteenth century than in
the seventeenth, far greater in the seventeenth than
in the sixteenth. The prodigious greatness to which
it has attained makes the question of its future
infinitely important and at the same time most
anxious, because it is evident that the great colonial
extension of our state exposes it to new dangers, from
which in its ancient insular insignificance it was
free.

The interest of English history ought therefore to
deepen steadily to the close, and, since the future
grows out of the past, the history of the past of
England ought to give rise to a prophecy concerning
her future. Yet our popular historians scarcely seem
to think so. Does not Aristotle say that a drama
ends, but an epic poem only leaves off? English
history, as it is popularly related, not only has no
distinct end, but leaves off in such a gradual manner,
growing feebler and feebler, duller and duller, towards
the close, that one might suppose that England, instead
of steadily gaining in strength, had been for a century
or two dying of mere old age. Can this be right 1
Ought the stream to be allowed thus to lose itself
and evaporate in the midst of a sandy desert 1 The
question brings to mind those lines of Wordsworth :

I TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTOEY 3

It is not to be thought of that the flood
Of British freedom, which to the open sea
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed "with pomp of waters unwithstood,"
Roused though it be full often to a mood
Which spurns the check of salutary bands,
That this most famous stream in bogs and sands
Should perish, and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever —

Well ! this sad fate, which is " not to be thought of,"
is just what befalls, if not the stream itself of British
freedom, yet the reflection of it in our popular
histories.

Now suppose we wish to remedy this evil, how
shall we proceed? Here is no bad question for
historical students at the opening of an academic
year, the opening perhaps to some of their academic
course. You are asked to think over English history
as a whole and consider if you cannot find some
meaning, some method in it, if you cannot state some
conclusion to which it leads. Hitherto perhaps you
have learned names and dates, lists of kings, lists of
battles and wars. The time comes now when you
are to ask yourselves, To what end 1 For what
practical purpose are these facts collected and
committed to memory? If they lead to no great
truths having at the same time scientific generality
and momentous practical bearings, then history is
but an amusement and will scarcely hold its own
in the conflict of studies.

No one can long study history without being
haunted by the idea of development, of progress,

4 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

We move onward, both each of us and all of us
together. England is not now what it was under the
Stuarts or the Tudors, and in these last centuries at
least there is much to favour the view that the
movement is progressive, that it is toward something
better. But how shall we define this movement, and
how shall we measure it ? If we are to study history
in that rational spirit, with that definite object which
I have recommended, we must fix our minds on this
question and arrive at some solution of it. We
must not be content with those vague flourishes which
the old school of historians, who according to my view
lost themselves in mere narrative, used to add for
form's sake before winding-up.

Those vague flourishes usually consisted in some
reference to what was called the advance of civilisation.
No definition of civilisation was given ; it was spoken
of in metaphorical language as a light, a day
gradually advancing through its twilight and its dawn
towards its noon ; it was contrasted with a remote
ill-defined period, called the Dark Ages. Whether it
would always go on brightening, or whether, like the
physical day, it would pass again into afternoon and
evening, or whether it would come to an end by a
sudden eclipse, as the light of civilisation in the
ancient world might appear to have done, all this was
left in the obscurity convenient to a theory which
was not serious, and which only existed for the
purpose of rhetorical ornament.

It is a very fair sample of bad philosophising, this
theory of civilisation. You have to explain a large

I TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY 5

mass of phenomena, about which you do not even
know that they are of the same kind — but they
happen to come into view at the same time ; — what
do you do but fling over the whole mass a word,
which holds them together like a net 1 You carefully
avoid defining this word, but in speaking of it you
use metaphors which imply that it denotes a living
force of unknown, unlimited properties, so that a
mere reference to it is enough to explain the most
wonderful, the most dissimilar effects. It was used
to explain a number of phenomena which had no
further apparent connection with each other than that
they happened often to appear together in history ;
sometimes the softening of manners, sometimes
mechanical inventions, sometimes religious toleration,
sometimes the appearance of great poets and artists,
sometimes scientific discoveries, sometimes constitu-
tional liberty. It was assumed, though it was never
proved, that all these things belonged together and
had a hidden cause, which was the working of the
spirit of civilisation.

We might no doubt take this theory in hand, and
give it a more coherent appearance. We might start
with the one principle of freedom of thought, and
trace all the consequences that will follow from that.
Scientific discoveries and mechanical inventions may
flow from it, if certain other conditions are present ;
such discoveries and inventions coming into general
use will change the appearance of human life, give it
a complicated, modern aspect ; this change then we
might call the advance of civilisation. But political

6 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

liberty has no connection with all this. There was
liberty at Athens before Plato and Aristotle, but
afterwards it died out ; liberty at Eome when thought
was rude and ignorant, but servitude after it became
enlightened. And poetical genius has nothing to
do with it, for poetry declined at Athens just as
philosophy began, and there was a Dante in Italy
before the Renaissance, but no Dante after it.

If we analyse this vague sum-total which we call
civilisation, we shall find that a large part of it is
what might be expected from the name, that is, the
result of the union of men in civil communities or
states, but that another part is only indirectly con-
nected with this and is more immediately due to
other causes. The progress of science, for example,
might be held to be the principal factor in civilisation,
yet, as I have just pointed out, it by no means varies
regularly with civil well-being, though for the most
part it requires a certain modicum of civil well-being.
That part of the human lot " which laws or kings can
cause or cure " is strictly limited. Now history may
assume a larger or a narrower function. It may
investigate all the causes of human well-being alike ;
on the other hand it may attach itself to the civil
community and to the part of human well-being
which depends on that. Now by a kind of un-
conscious tradition the latter course has more usually
been taken. Run over the famous histories that have
been written; you will see that the writers have
always had in view, more or less consciously, states
and governments, their internal development, their

I TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY 7

mutual dealings. It may be quite true that affairs
of this kind are not ahvays the most important of
human affairs. In the period recorded by Thucydides
the most permanently important events may have
been the philosophical career of Socrates and the
artistic career of Phidias, yet Thucydides has nothing
to say of either, while he enlarges upon wars and
intrigues which now seem petty. This is not the
effect of any narrowness of view. Thucydides is
alive to the unique glory of the city he describes ;
how else could he have "vvTitten (f)iXoKaXov/j-ev fier
€VT€\e[a<; koX (f)i\oao(})ov/jL€v dvev fMaXaKLWi ? nay,
so far as that glory was the result of political causes,
he is ready to discuss it, as that very passage shows.
It is with purpose and deliberation that he restricts
himself. The truth is that investigation makes pro-
gress by dividing and subdividing the field. If you
discuss everything at once, you certainly get the
advantage of a splendid variety of topics; but you
do not make progress ; if you would make progress,
you must concentrate your attention upon one set
of phenomena at a time. It seems to me advisable
to keep history still within the old lines, and to
treat separately the important subjects which were
omitted in that scheme. I consider therefore that
history has to do with the State, that it investigates
the growth and changes of a certain corporate society,
which acts through certain functionaries and certain
assemblies. By the nature of the State every person
who lives in a certain territory is usually a member
of it, but history is not concerned with individuals

8 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

except in their capacity of members of a State.
That a man in England makes a scientific discovery
or paints a picture, is not in itself an event in the
history of England. Individuals are important in
history in proportion, not to their intrinsic merit,
but to their relation to the State. Socrates was a
much greater man than Cleon, but Cleon has a much
greater space in Thucydides. Newton was a greater
man than Harley, yet it is Harley, not Newton, who
fixes the attention of the historian of the reign of
Queen Anne.

After this explanation you will see that the
question I raised. What is the general drift or goal
of English history? is much more definite than it
might at first sight appear. I am not thinking of any
general progress that the human race everywhere
alike, and therefore also in England, may chance to
be making, nor even necessarily of any progress
peculiar to England. By England I mean solely
the state or political community which has its seat in
England. Thus strictly limited, the question may
seem to you perhaps a good deal less interesting ;
however that may be, it certainly becomes much more
manageable.

The English State then, in what direction and
towards what goal has that been advancing? The
words which jump to our lips in answer are Liberty,
Democracy I They are words which want a great
deal of defining. Liberty has of course been a
leading characteristic of England as compared with
continental countries, but in the main liberty is not

I TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY 9

SO much an end to which we have been tending as
a possession Avhich we have long enjoyed. The
struggles of the seventeenth century secured it —
even if they did not first acquire it — for us. In
later times there has been a movement towards
something which is often called liberty, but not so
correctly. We may, if we like, call it democracy ;
and I suppose the current opinion is that if any large
tendency is discernible in the more recent part of
English history, it is this tendency, by which first
the middle class and then gradually the lower
classes have been admitted to a share of influence in
public aflfairs.

Discernible enough no doubt this tendency is, at
least in the nineteenth century, for in the eighteenth
century only the first beginnings of it can be traced.
It strikes our attention most, because it has made for
a long time past the staple of political talk and
controversy. But history ought to look at things
from a greater distance and more comprehensively.
If we stand aloof a little and follow with our eyes
the progress of the English State, the great governed
society of English people, in recent centuries, we
shall be much more struck by another change, Avhich
is not only far greater but even more conspicuous,
though it has always been less discussed, partly
because it proceeded more gradually, partly because
it excited less opposition. I mean the simi^le obvious
fact of the extension of the English name into other
countries of the globe, the foundation of Greater
Britain.

! J

10 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

There is something very characteristic in the
indifference which we show towards this mighty
phenomenon of the diffusion of our race and the
expansion of our state. We seem, as it were, to have
conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of
absence of mind. While we were doing it, that is
in the eighteenth century, we did not allow it to
affect our imaginations or in any degree to change our
ways of thinking ; nor have we even now ceased to
think of ourselves as simply a race inhabiting an
island off the northern coast of the Continent of
Europe. We constantly betray by our modes of
speech that we do not reckon our colonies as really
belonging to us; thus if we are asked what the
English population is, it does not occur to us to
reckon -in the population of Canada and Australia.
This fixed way of thinking has influenced our
historians. It causes them, I think, to miss the true
point of view in describing the eighteenth century.
They make too much of the mere parliamentary
wrangle and the agitations about liberty, in all which
matters the eighteenth century of England was but a
pale reflection of the seventeenth. They do not
perceive that in that century the history of England
is not in England but in America and Asia. In like
manner I believe that when we look at the present
state of affairs, and still more at the future, we ought
to beware of putting England alone in the fore-
ground and suff"ering what we call the English
possessions to escape our view in the background
of the picture.

I TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY 11

Let me describe ^vith some exactness the change
that has taken place. In the last years of Queen
Elizabeth England had absolutely no possessions
outside 'Europe, for all schemes of settlement, from
that of Hore in Henry VIII. 's reign to those of
Gilbert and Raleigh, had failed alike. Great Britain
did not yet exist ; Scotland was a separate kingdom,
and in Ireland the English were but a colony in the
midst of an alien population still in the tribal stage.
With the accession of the Stuart family commenced
at the same time two processes, one of which
was brought to completion under the last Stuart,
Queen Anne, while the other has continued without
interruption ever since. Of these the first is the
internal union of the three kingdoms, which, though
technically it was not completed till much later, may
be said to be substantially the work of the seven-
teenth century and the Stuart dynasty. The second
was the creation of a still larger Britain compre-
hending vast possessions beyond the sea. This
process began with the first Charter given to Virginia
in 1606. It made a great advance in the seventeenth
century ; but not till the eighteenth did Greater
Britain in its gigantic dimensions and with its vast
politics first stand clearly before the world. Let us
consider what this Greater Britain at the present day
precisely is.

Excluding certain small possessions, which are
chiefly of the nature of naval or military stations,
it consists besides the United Kingdom of four great
groups of territory, inhabited either chiefly or to a

12 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect,

large extent by Englishmen and subject to the Crown,

and a fifth great territory also subject to the Crown
and ruled by English officials, but inhabited by a
completely foreign race. The first four are the
Dominion of Canada, the West Indian Islands, among
which I include some territories on the continent
of Central and Southern America, the mass of South
African possessions of which Cape Colony is the most
considerable, and fourthly the Australian group, to
which, simply for convenience, I must here add New
Zealand. The dependency is India.

Now what is the extent and value of these
possessions 1 First let us look at their population,
which, the territory being as yet newly settled, is in
many cases thin. The Dominion of Canada with
Newfoundland had in 1881 a population of rather
more than four millions and a half — that is, about
equal to the population of Sweden ; the West Indian
group rather more than a million and a half, about
equal to the population at the same time of Greece ;
the South African group about a million and three
quarters, but of these much less than a half are of
European blood ; the Australian group about three
millions, rather more than the population of Swit-
zerland. This makes a total of ten millions and
three quarters, or about ten millions of English
subjects of European and mainly English blood
outside the British Islands.

The population of the great dependency India was
nearly a hundred and ninety-eight millions, and the
native states in India which look up to England aa

I TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY 13

the paramount Power had about fifty-seven millions
in addition. The total makes a population roughly
equal to that of all Europe excluding Russia.

But of course it strikes us at once that this
enormous Indian population does not make part of
Greater Britain in the same sense as those ten
millions of Englishmen who live outside of the
British Islands. The latter are of our own blood,
and are therefore united with us by the strongest tie.
The former are of alien race and religion, and are
bound to us only by the tie of conquest. It may
be fairly questioned whether the possession of India
does or ever can increase our power or our security,
while there is no doubt that it vastly increases our
dangers and responsibilities. Our colonial Empire
stands on quite a different footing ; it has some of the
fundamental conditions of stability. There are in
general three ties by which states are held together,
community of race, community of religion, community
of interest. By the first two our colonies are
evidently bound to us, and this fact by itself makes
the connection strong. It will grow indissolubly firm
if we come to recognise also that interest bids us
maintain the connection, and this conviction seems to
gain ground. When we inquire then into the
Greater Britain of the future we ought to think
much more of our Colonial than of our Indian
Empire.

This is an important consideration when we come
to estimate the Empire not by population but by
territorial area. Ten millions of Englishmen beyond

14 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

the sea, — this is something; but it is absolutely
nothing compared with what will ultimately, nay
with what will speedily, be seen. For those millions
are scattered over an enormous area, which fills up
Avith a rapidity quite unlike the increase of population
in England. That you may measure the importance
of this consideration, I give you one fact. The
density of population in Great Britain is two hundred
and ninety-one to the square mile, in Canada it is not
much more than one to the square mile. Suppose
for a moment the Dominion of Canada peopled as
fully as Great Britain, its population would actually
be more than a thousand millions. That state of
things is no doubt very remote, but an immense
increase is not remote. In not much more than half
a century the Englishmen beyond the sea — supposing
the Empire to hold together — will be equal in number
to the Englishmen at home, and the total will be
much more than a hundred millions.

These figures may perhaps strike you as rather
overwhelming than interesting. You may make it
a question whether we ought to be glad of this vast
increase of our race, whether it would not be better
for us to advance morally and intellectually than in
mere population and possessions, whether the great
things have not for the most part been done by the
small nations, and so on. But I do not quote these
figures in order to gratify our national pride. I
leave it an open question whether our increase ia
matter for exultation or for regret. It is not yet
time to consider that. What is clear in the mean-

I TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY 15

time is the immense importance of this increase.
Good or bad, it is evidently the great fact of modern
English history. And it would be the greatest
mistake to imagine that it is a merely material fact,
or that it carries no moral and intellectual con-
sequences. People cannot change their abodes, pass
from an island to a continent, from the 50th degree
of north latitude to the tropics or the Southern
Hemisphere, from an ancient community to a new
colony, from vast manufacturing cities to sugar
plantations, or to lonely sheep-walks in countries
where aboriginal savage tribes still wander, without
changing their ideas and habits and ways of thinking,
nay without somewhat modifying in the course of
a few generations their physical type. "We know
already that the Canadian and the Victorian are not
quite like the Englishman ; do we suppose then that
in the next century, if the colonial population has
become as numerous as that of the mother-country,
assuming that the connection has been maintained and
has become closer, England itself will not be very
much modified and transformed 1 Whether good or
bad then, the growth of Greater Britain is an event of
enormous magnitude.

Evidently as regards the future it is the greatest
event. But an event may be very great, and yet be
so simple that there is not much to be said about it,
that it has scarcely any history. It is thus that the
great English Exodus is commonly regarded, as if it
had happened in the most simple, inevitable manner,
as if it were merely the unopposed occupation of

16 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

empty countries by the nation which happened to
have the greatest surplus population and the greatest
maritime power. I shall show this to be a great
mistake. I shall show that this Exodus makes a
most ample and a most full and interesting chapter
in English history, I shall venture to assert that
during the eighteenth century it determines the
whole course of affairs, that the main struggle of
England from the time of Louis XIV. to the time of
Napoleon was for the possession of the New "World,
and that it is for want of perceiving this that most
of us find that century of English history unin-
teresting.

The great central fact in this chapter of history is
that we have had at different times two such Empires.
So decided is the drift of our destiny towards the
occupation of the New World that after we had
created one Empire and lost it, a second grew up
almost in our own despite. The figures I gave you
refer exclusively to our second Empire, to that
which we still possess. When I spoke of the ten
millions of English subjects who live beyond the sea,
I did not pause to mention that a hundred years ago
we had another set of colonies which had already a
population of three millions, that these colonies broke
off from us and formed a federal state, of which the
population has in a century multiplied more than
sixteenfold, and is now equal to that of the mother
country and its colonies taken together. It is an
event of prodigious magnitude, not only that this
Empire should have been lost to us, but that a new

I TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY 17

state, English in race and character, should have
sprung up, and that this state should have grown in
a century to be greater in population than every
European state except Eussia. But the loss we
suffered in the secession of the American colonies has
left in the English mind a doubt, a misgiving, which
affects our whole forecast of the future of England.

For if this English Exodus has been the greatest
English event of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the greatest English question of the future
must be, what is to become of our second Empire, and
whether or no it may be expected to go the way of
the first. In the solution of this question lies that
moral which I said ought to result from the study of
English history.

It is an old saying, to which Turgot gave
utterance a quarter of a century before the De-
claration of Independence, " Colonies are like fruits
which cling to the tree only till they ripen." He
added, " As soon as America can take care of herself,
she will do what Carthage did." What wonder that
when this prediction was so signally fulfilled, the
proposition from which it had been deduced rose,
especially in the minds of the English, to the rank of
a demonstrated principle ! This no doubt is the
reason why we have regarded the growth of a second
Empire with very little interest or satisfaction.
"What matters," we have said, "its vastness or its
rapid growth 1 It does not grow for us." And to
the notion that we cannot keep it we have added the
notion that we need not wish to keep it, because,
c

18 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

with that curious kind of optimistic fatalism to
which historians are liable, the historians of our
American war have generally felt bound to make out
that the loss of our colonies was not only inevitable,
but was even a fortunate thing for us.

Whether these views are sound, I do not inquire
now. I merely point out that two alternatives are
before us, and that the question, incomparably the
greatest question which we can discuss, refers to the
choice between them. The four groups of colonies
may become four independent states, and in that case
two of them, the Dominion of Canada and the West
Indian group, will have to consider the question
whether admission into the United States will not be
better for them than independence. In any case the
English name and English institutions will have a
vast predominance in the New World, and the
separation may be so managed that the mother-
country may continue always to be regarded with
friendly feelings. Such a separation would leave
England on the same level as the states nearest to us
on the Continent, populous, but less so than Germany
and scarcely equal to France. But two states, Russia
and the United States, would be on an altogether
higher scale of magnitude, Russia having at once,
and the United States perhaps before very long, twice
our population. Our trade too would be exposed to
wholly new risks.

The other alternative is, that England may prove

' able to do what the United States does so easily,

that is, hold together in a federal union countries

I TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTOEY 19

very remote from each other. In that case England
■will take rank with Russia and the United States in
the first rank of state, measured hy population and
area, and in a higher rank than the states of the
Continent. We ought by no means to take for
granted that this is desirable. Bigness is not
necessarily greatness ; if by remaining in the second
rank of magnitude we can hold the first rank morally
and intellectually, let us sacrifice mere material
magnitude. But though we must not prejudge the
question whether we ought to retain our Empire, we
may fairly assume that it is desirable after due
consideration to judge it.

With a view to forming such a judgment, I
propose in these lectures to examine historically the
tendency to expansion which England has so long
displayed. We shall learn to think of it more
seriously if we discover it to be profound, persistent,
necessary to the national life, and more hopefully if
we can satisfy ourselves that the secession of our
first colonies was not a mere normal result of ex-
pansion, like the bursting of a bubble, but the result
■ of temporary conditions, removable and which have
been removed.

LECTUEE II

ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

It was in the eighteenth century that the expansion
of England advanced most rapidly. If therefore we
would understand the nature of that expansion, and
measure how much it absorbed of the energy and
vitality of the nation, we cannot do better than
consult the records of the eighteenth century. Those
records too, if I mistake not, will acquire new
interest from being regarded from this point of
view.

I constantly remark, both in our popular histories
and in occasional allusions to the eighteenth century,
what a faint and confused impression that period has
left upon the national memory. In a great part of
it we see nothing but stagnation. The wars seem to
lead to nothing, and we do "not perceive the working
of any new political ideas. That time seems to have
created little, so that we can only think of it as pros-
perous, but not as memorable. Those dim figures
George I. and George II., the long tame administra-

LECT. II ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY 21

tions of Walpole and Pelham, the commercial war
with Spain, the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy,
the foolish Prime Minister Newcastle, the dull brawls
of the Wilkes period, the miserable American war ; —
everywhere alike we seem to remark a want of great-
ness, a distressing commonness and flatness in men
and in affairs. But what we chiefly miss is unity.
In France the corresponding period has just as little
greatness, but it has unity ; it is intelligible ; we can
describe it in one word as the age of the approach of
the Eevolution. But what is the English eighteenth
century, and what has come of it? What was ap-
proaching then 1

But do we take the right way to discover the unity
of a historical period 1

We have an unfortunate habit of distributing
historical afiairs under reigns. We do this mechanic-
ally, as it were, even in periods where we recognise,
nay, where we exaggerate, the insignificance of the
monarch. The first Georges were, in my opinion, by
no means so insignificant as is often supposed, but
even the most influential sovereign has seldom a
right to give his name to an age. Much miscon-
ception, for example, has arisen out of the expression.
Age of Louis XIV. The first step then in arranging
and dividing any period of English history is to get
rid of such useless headings as Keign of Queen Anne,
Reign of George I., Reign of George II. In place of
these we must study to put divisions founded upon
some real stage of progress in the national life. We
must look onward not from king to king, but from

22 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leoT.

great event to great event. And in order to do this
we must estimate events, measure their greatness ; a
thing which cannot be done without considering them
and analysing them closely. When with respect to
any event we have satisfied ourselves that it deserves
to rank among the leading events of the national
history, the next step is to trace the causes by which
it was produced. In this way each event takes the
character of a development, and each development
of this kind furnishes a chapter to the national
history, a chapter which will get its name from the
event.

For a plain example of the principle take the reign
of George III. What can be more absurd than to
treat this long period of sixty years as if it had any
historical unity, simply because one man was king
during the whole of iti What then are we to
substitute for the king as a principle of division 1
Evidently great events. One part of the reign will
make a chapter by itself as the period of the loss of
America, another as that of the struggle with the
French Revolution.

But in a national history there are large as well as
smaller divisions. Besides chapters there are, as it
were, books or parts. This is because the great
events, when examined closely, are seen to be con-
nected with each other; those which are chrono-
logically nearest to each other are seen to be similar ;
they fall into groups, each of which may be regarded
as a single complex event, and the complex events
give their names to the parts, as the simpler events

II ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKT 23

give their names to the separate chapters, of the
history.

In some periods of history this process is so easy
that we perform it almost unconsciously. The events
bear their significance written on their face, and the
connection of events is also obvious. When you read
the reign of Louis XV. of France, you feel without
waiting to reason that you are reading of the fall of
the French Monarchy. But in other parts of history
the clue is less easy to find, and it is here that we feel
that embarrassment and want of interest which, as I
have said. Englishmen are conscious of when they look
back upon their eighteenth century. In most cases
of this kind the fault is in the reader ; he would be
interested in the period if he had the clue to it, and
he would find the clue if he sought it deliberately.

We are to look then at the great events of the
eighteenth century, examine each to see its precise
significance, and compare them together with a view
to discovering any general tendency there may be.
I speak roughly of course when I say the eighteenth
century. More precisely I mean the period which
begins with the Revolution of 1688 and ends with
the peace of 1815. Now what are the great events
during this period? There are no revolutions. In
the way of internal disturbance all that we find is
two abortive Jacobite insurrections in 1715 and
1745. There is a change of dynasty, and one of an
unusual kind, but it is accomplished peacefully by Act
of Parliament. The great events are all of one sort,
they are foreign wars.

24 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

These wars are on a much larger scale than any
which England had waged before, since the Hundred
Years' War of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
They are also of a more formal business-like kind
than earlier wars. For England has now for the first
\l time a standing army and navy. The great English
navy first took definite shape in the wars of the
Commonwealth, and the English Army, founded on
the Mutiny Bill, dates from the reign of William III.
Between the Kevolution and the Battle of Waterloo
it may be reckoned that we waged seven great wars,
of which the shortest lasted seven years and the
longest about twelve. Out of a hundred and twenty-
six years, sixty-four years, or more than half, were
spent in war.

That these wars were on a greater scale than any
which had preceded, may be estimated by the burden
which they laid upon the country. Before this
period England had of course often been at war ; still
at the commencement of it England had no consider-
able debt — her debt was less than a million — but at
the end of this period, in 1817, her debt amounted
to eight hundred and forty millions. And you are
to beware of taking even this large amount as
measuring the expensiveness of the wars. Eight
hundred and forty millions was not the cost of the
wars; it was only that part of the cost which the
nation could not meet at once; but an enormous
amount had been paid at once. And yet this debt
alone, contracted in a period of a hundred and
twenty years, is equivalent to seven millions a year

II ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY 25

spent on war during the whole time, while for a good
part of the eighteenth century the whole annual cost
of government did not exceed seven millions.

This series of great wars is evidently the
characteristic feature of the period, for not only dof;s
it begin with this period, but also appears to end
with it. Since 1815 we have had local wars in India
and some of our colonies, but of struggles against
great European Powers, such as this period saw seven
times, we have only seen one in a period more than
half as long, and it lasted but two years.

Let us pass these wars in review. There was first
the European war in which England was involved
by the Eevolution of 1688. It is pretty well
remembered, since the story of it has been told by
Macaulay. It lasted eight years, from 1689 to 1697.
There was then the great war called from the
Spanish Succession, which we shall always remember,
because it was the war of Marlborough's victories.
It lasted eleven years, from 1702 to 1713. The ^2
next great war has now passed almost entirely out of
memory, not having brought to light any very great
commander, nor achieved any definite result. But
we have all heard speak of the fable of Jenkins' ears,
and we have heard of the battles of Dettingcn and
Fontenoy, though perhaps few of us could give a
rational account either of the reason for fighting them ^
or of the result that came of them. And yet this
war too lasted nine years, from 1739 to 1748. Next / "r
comes the Seven Years' War, in which we have not
forgotten the victories of Frederick. In the English

1^

/

26 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

part of it we all remember one grand incident, the
battle of the Heights of Abraham, the death of
Wolfe, and the conquest of Canada. And yet in the
case of this war also it may be observed how much
the eighteenth century has faded out of our imagin-
ations. We have quite forgotten that that victory
was one of a long series, which to contemporaries
seemed fabulous, so that the nation came out of the
struggle intoxicated with glory, and England stood
upon a pinnacle of greatness which she had never
reached before. We have forgotten how, through all
that remained of the eighteenth century, the nation
looked back upon those two or three splendid years ^
as upon a happiness that could never return, and
how long it continued to be the unique boast of the
Englishman

That Chatham's language was his mother-tongue
And Wolfe's great heart compatriot with his own.

This is the fourth war. It is in sharp contrast with
the fifth, which we have tacitly agreed to mention as
seldom as we can. What we call the American war,
which from the first outbreak of hostilities to the
Peace of Paris lasted eight years, from 1775 to 1783,

^ Mark how the unenthusiastic "Walpole writes of them :
" Intrigues of the Cabinet or of Parliament scarcely existed at that
period. All men were, or seemed to be, transported with the
success of their country, and content with an Administration which
outwent their warmest wishes or made their jealousy ashamed to
show itself. One episode indeed there was, in which less heroic
aifections were concerned ... it will diversify the story, and by
the intermixture of human passions serve to convince posterity
that such a display of immortal actions as illustrate the following
pages is not the exhibition of a fabulous age."

II ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 27

was indeed ignominious enough in America, but iu
its latter part it spread into a grand naval war, in
which England stood at bay against almost all the
world, and in this, through the victories of Eodney,
we came off with some credit. The sixth and seventh
are the two great wars with Revolutionary France,
which we are not likely to forget, though we ought
to keep them more separate in our minds than we do.
The first lasted nine years from 1793 to 1802, the
second twelve, from 1803 to 1815.

Now probably it has occurred to few of us to
connect these wars together, or to look for any unity
of plan or purpose pervading them. If such a
thought did occur, we should probably find ourselves
hopelessly baffled in our first attempts. In one war
the question appears to be of the method of suc-
cession to the CroAvn of Spain, in another war of the
Austrian succession and of the succession to the
Empire. But if there seems so far some resemblance,
what have these succession questions to do with the
right of search claimed by the Spaniards along
the Spanish Main, or the limits of Acadie, or the
principles of the French Revolution? And as the
grounds of quarrel seem quite accidental, so we are
bewildered by the straggling haphazard character of
the wars themselves. Hostilities may break out in
the Low Countries or in the heart of Germany, but
the war is waged, so it seems, anywhere or every-
where, at Madras, or at the mouth of the St,
Lawrence, or on the banks of the Ohio. Thus
Macaulay says in speaking of Frederick's invasion of

28. EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

Silesia, " In order that he might rob a neighbour
whom he had promised to defend, black men fought
on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each
other by the Great Lakes of North America." On a
first survey such is the confused appearance which
these wars present.

But look a little closer, and after all you will
discover some uniformities. For example, out of
these seven wars of England five are wars with
France from the beginning, and both the other two,
though the belligerent at the outset was in the first
Spain and in the second our own colonies, yet became
in a short time and ended as wars with France.

Now here is one of those general facts which we
are in search of. The full magnitude of it is not
usually perceived, because the whole middle part of
the eighteenth century has passed too much into
oblivion. We have not forgotten that there were
two great wars with France just about the junction
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and two
other great wars with France about the junction of
the seventeenth and eighteenth, but we have half
forgotten that near the middle of the eighteenth
century there Avas another great war of England and
France, and that, as prelude and afterpiece to this
war, there was a war with Spain which turned into a
war with France, and a war with America which
turned into a war with France. The truth is, these
wars group themselves very symmetrically, and the
whole period stands out as an age of ^^aiitio rivalry_
between England and France, a kind of second

n ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 29

Hundred Years' War. In fact in those times and
down to our own memory the eternal discord of
England and France appeared so much a law of
nature that it was seldom spoken of. The wars of
their own times, blending with a vague recollection
of Cr^cy, Poictiers and Agincourt, created an im-
pression in the minds of those generations, that
England and France always had been at war and \y
always would be. But this was a pure illusion. In^
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England
and France had not been these persistent enemies.
The two states had often been in alliance against
Spain. In the seventeenth century an Anglo-French
Alliance had been almost the rule. Elizabeth and
Henri IV. are allies, Charles I. has a French queen,
Cromwell acts in concert with Mazarin, Charles II.
and James II. make themselves dependent upon
Louis XIV.

But may not this frequent recurrence of war with
France have been a mere accident, arising from the
nearness of France and the necessary frequency of
collisions with her % On examination you will find
that it is not merely accidental, but that these wars
are connected together in internal causation as well
as in time. It is rather the occasional cessation of
war that is accidental ; the recurrence is natural and
inevitable. There is indeed one long truce of twenty -
seven years after the Peace of Utrecht ; this was the
natural effect of the exhaustion in which all Europe
was left by the war of the Spanish Succession, a war
almost as great in comparison with the then magnitude

30 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

of the European states as the great struggle with
Napoleon. But when this truce was over we may
almost regard all the wars which followed as con-
stituting one war interrupted by occasional pauses.
'At any rate the three wars between 1740 and 1783,
those commonly called the War of the Austrian
Succession, the Seven Years' War and the American
War, are, so far as they are wars of England and
France, intimately connected together, and form as it
were a trilogy of wars. I call your attention par-
ticularly to this, because this group of wars, considered
as one great event with a single great object and
result, supplies just the grand feature which that
time seems so sadly to want. It is only our own
blindness and perversity which leads us to overlook
the grandeur of that phase in our history, while
we fix our eyes upon petty domestic occurrences,
parliamentary quarrels, party intrigue, and court-
gossip. It so happens that the accession of George
III. falls in the middle of this period, and seems to
us, in consequence of our childish mode of arranging
history, to create a division, where there is no real
division, but rather unusually manifest continuity.
And as in parliamentary and party politics the
accession of George III. really did make a consider-
able epoch, and the temptation of our historians is
always to write the history rather of the Parliament
than of the State and nation, a false scent misleads
us here, and we remain quite blind to one of the
grandest and most memorable turning-points in our
history, I say these wars make one grand_^nd

II ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CEIJTURY 31

decisive^ struggle between England and France. For
look at the facts. Nominally the first of these three
wars was ended by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in
1748. Nominally there followed eight years of peace
between England and France. But really it was not
so at all. Whatever virtue the treaty of Aix-la-
Chapelle may have had towards settling the quarrels
of the other European Powers concerned in the war,
it scarcely interrupted for a moment the conflict
between England and France. It scarcely even
appeared to do so, for the great question of the
boundary of the English and French settlements in
America, of the limits of Acadie and Canada, was
disputed with just as much heat after the Treaty as
before it. And not in words only but by arms, just
as much as if war were still going on. Moreover,
what I remark of the American frontier is equally
true of another frontier, along which at that time the
English and French met each other, namely in India.
It is a remarkable, little-noticed fact that some of the
most memorable encounters between the English and
the French which have ever taken place in the course
of their long rivalry, some of the classic occurrences
of our military history, took place in these eight years
when nominally England and France were at peace.
We have all heard how the French built Fort
Duquesne on the Ohio River, how our colony of
Virginia sent a body of 400 men under the command
of George Washington, then a very young man and
a British subject, to attack it, and how Washington
was surrounded and forced to capitulate. We have

32 , EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

heard too of the defeat and death of General Braddock
in the same parts. Still better do we remember the
struggle between Dupleix and Clive in India, the
defence of Arcot and the deeds which led to the
founding of our Indian Empire. All these events
were part of a desperate struggle for supremacy
~/^" between England and France, but you will find that
most of them took place after the Treaty of Aix-la-
Chapelle in 1748 and before the commencement of
the second war in 1756.

We have then one great conflict lasting from 1744
or a little earlier to the Peace of Paris in 1763
through a period of about twenty years. It ended
in the most disastrous defeat that has ever, in modern
times, been suffered by France except in 1870, a
defeat which in fact sealed the fate of the House of
Bourbon. But fifteen years later, and just within the
lifetime of the great statesman who had guided us to
victory, England and France were at war again.
France entered into relations with our insurgent
colonies, acknowledged their independence, and as-
sisted them with troops. Once more for five years
there was Avar by land and sea between England and
France. But are we to suppose that this was a
wholly new war, and not rather a sort of after-swell
of the great disturbance that had so recently been
stilled? It was not for a moment dissembled that
France now in our hour of distress took vengeance for
what she had suffered from us. This was her revenge
for the loss of Canada, namely, to create the United
States. In the words which on a later occasion

tl ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 33

became so celebrated, she " called a new world into
existence to redress the balance of the old."

Thus these three great wars are more clearly
connected together than they might appear to be.
But how closely connected they are we shall not see
until we ask ourselves what the ground of quarrel
was, and whether the same gi-ound of quarrel runs
under all of them. At first sight it appears to be
other^vise. For the war of England and France does ■
not at any time stand, out distinct and isolated, but ,' ^
is mixed up with other wars which are going on at )
the same time. Such immense complex medleys are
characteristic of the eighteenth century. What, for
instance, can the capture of Quebec have to do with
the struggle of Frederick and Maria Theresa for
Silesia ? In such medleys there is great room for
historical mistakes, for premature generalisation.
What is really at issue may be misunderstood ; as for
instance, when we remark that in the Seven Years'
War all the Protestant Powers of Europe were
ranged on one side, we should go very far astray if
we tried to make out that it was Protestantism that
prevailed in India or in Canada over the spirit of
Catholicism.

I said that the expansion of England in the New
World and in Asia is the formula which sums up for
England the history of the eighteenth century. I
point out now that the great triple war of the middle
of that century is neither more nor less than the^ /
great decisive duel between England and France for i ^
the possession of the New World. It was perhaps /

34 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

scarcely perceived at the time, as it has been seldom
remarked since ; but the explanation of that second
Hundred Years' War between England and France
which fills the eighteenth century is this, that they
were rival candidates for the possession of the New
World, and the triple war which fills the middle of
the century is, as it were, the decisive campaign in
that great world-struggle.
~- We did not take possession of North America
simply because we found it empty and had more
ships than other nations by which we might carry
colonists into it. Not indeed that we conquered it
^ '; from another Power which already had possession of
j it. But we had a competitor in the work of
I settlement, a competitor who in some respects had
1 got the start of us, namely France.
L The simple fact about North America is this, that
about the same time that James I. was giving
charters to Virginia and New England the French
were founding farther North the two settlements of
Acadie and Canada, and again, about the time that
William Penn got his Charter for Pennsylvania from
Charles II., the Frenchman La Salle, by one of the
greatest feats of discovery, made his way from the
Great Lakes to the sources of the Mississippi, and
putting his boats upon the stream descended the
whole vast river to the Gulf of Mexico, laying open
a great territory, which immediately afterwards
became the French colony of Louisiana. Such was
the relation of France and England in North America,
at the time when the Revolution of 1688 opened

II ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 35

what I have called the Second Hundred Years' War )
of England and France. England had a row of
thriving colonies l3ang from North to South along the
Eastern coast, but France had the two great rivers,
the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi. A political
prophet comparing the prospects of the two colon-
ising Powers at the time of the Revolution, and
indeed much later, might have been led by observing
what an advantage the two rivers gave to France to
think that in the future North America would belong
to her rather than to England. _ .

But now it is most important to observe further »
that not only in America, but in Asia also, France
and England in that age advanced side by side.
The conquest of India by English merchants seems a
unique and abnormal phenomenon, but we should be
mistaken if we supposed that there was anything
peculiarly English, either in the originality which
conceived the idea or in the energy which carried it
into execution. So far as an idea of conquering
India was deliberately conceived, it was conceived bvj
Frenchmen; Frenchmen first perceived that it was
feasible and saw the manner in which it could be
done ; Frenchmen first set about it and advanced
some way towards accomplishing it. In India indeed
they had the start of us much more decidedly than
in North America ; in India we had at the outset a
sense of inferiority in comparison with them, and
fouglit in a spirit of hopeless self-defence. And I
find, when I study the English conquest of India,
that we were actuated neither by ambition nor yet

36 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

by mere desire to advance our trade, but that from
first to last — that is, from the first efforts of Clive to
the time when Lord Wellesley, Lord Minto and
Lord Hastings established our authority over the
whole vast peninsula — we were actuated by fear of the
French. Behind every movement of the native
Powers we saw French intrigue, French gold, French
ambition, and never, until we were masters of the
whole country, got rid of that feeling that the French
were driving us out of it, which had descended from
the days of Dupleix and Labourdonnais.

This fact then that, both in America and in Asia,
France and England stood in direct competition for
a prize of absolutely incalculable value, explains the
fact that France and England fought a second
Hundred Years' War. This is the ultimate ex-
planation, but the true ground of discord was not
always equally apparent even to the belligerents
themselves, and still less to the rest of the world.
For as in other ages so in this, occasional causes of
difference frequently arose between such near neigh-
bours, causes often sufficient by themselves to produce
a war ; and it was only in those three wars of the
middle of the eighteenth century that they fought
quite visibly and apparently on the question of the
New World. In the earlier wars of William HI and
of Anne other causes are more, or certainly not less,
operative, for the New World quarrel is not yet at
its height. And again in the later wars, tliat is the
two that followed the French Revolution, the question
of the New World is again falling into the back-

II ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 37

ground, because France has fairly lost her hold both
upon America and India, and can now do no more
than make despairing efforts to regain it. But in]
those three wars between 1740 and 1783 the struggle,
as between England and France, is entirely for the
New World. In the first of them the issue is fairly
joined ; in the second France suffers her fatal fall ; in
the third she takes her signal revenge. This is the
grand chapter in the history of Greater Britain, for it
is the first gi'eat struggle in which the Empire fights
as a whole, the colonies and settlements outside
Europe being here not merely dragged in the wake
of the mother-country, but actually taking the lead.
We ought to register this event with a very broad
mark in our Calendar of the eighteenth century.
The principal and most decisive incidents of it belong
to the latter half of the reign of George II.

But in our wars with Louis XIV. before and in
our wars with the French Eevolution afterwards, it
will be found on examination that, much more than
might be supposed, the real bone of contention
between England and France is the New World.^
The colonial question had indeed been growing in
magnitude throughout the seventeenth century, while
the other burning question of that age, the quarrel of
the two Churches, had been falling somewhat into
the background. Thus when Cromwell made war on
Spain, it is a question whether he attacked her as
the great Catholic PoAver or as the great monopolist
of the New World. In the same age the two great
Protestant Powers, England and Holland, who ought

38 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

in the interest of religion to have stood side by side,
are found waging furious war upon each other as
rival colonial Powers. Now it was by the great
discovery and settlement of Louisiana in 1683 that
France was brought into the forefront of colonial
Powers, and within six years of that event the
/Hundred Years' War of England and France began.
In the first war of the series however, though it
stands marked in histories of North America as the
"first intercolonial war," the colonial question is not
very prominent. But it is prominent in the second,
which has been called the War of the Spanish Suc-
cession. We must not be misled by this name.
Much has been said of the wicked waste of blood and
treasure of which we were guilty, when we inter-
fered in a Spanish question with which we had no
concern, or terrified ourselves with a phantom of
French Ascendency which had no reality. How
much better, it has been said, to devote ourselves to
the civilising pursuits of trade ! But read in Ranke ^
how the war broke out. You will find that it was
precisely trade that led us into it. The Spanish
Succession touched us because France threatened, by
establishing her influence in Spain, to enter into the
Spanish monopoly of the New World and to shut us
irrevocably out of it. Accordingly the great practical
results of this war to England were colonial, namely,
the conquest of Acadie and the Asicnto contract,

* Better still in Europdische Oeschichte im \%ten Jahrhunderte,
by C. V. Noonlen, in wliicli book that great European transition
ia for the first time adequately treated.

II ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH GENTUKY 39

which for the first time made England on the great
scale a slave-trading Power.

Not less true is it of our wars with the
French Revolution and with Napoleon, that the
possession of the New World was among the grounds
of quarrel. As in the American war France avenges
on England her expulsion from the New World, so
under Napoleon she makes Titanic efforts to recover
her lost place there. This indeed is Napoleon's fixed \
view with regard to England. He sees in England
never the island, the European State, but always the
World - Empire, the network of dependencies and
colonies and islands covering every sea, among which
he was himself destined to find at last his prison and
his grave. Thus when in 1798 he was put in charge
for the first time of the war with England, he begins
by examining the British Channel, and no doubt
glances at Ireland. But what he sees does not
tempt him, although a few months afterward Ireland
broke out in a terrible rebellion, during which if the
conqueror of Italy had suddenly landed at the head
of a French army, undoubtedly he would have struck
a heavier blow at England than any she has yet
suffered. His mind is preoccupied with other
thoughts. He remembers how France once seemed
on the point of conquering India, until England ^
checked her progress ; accordingly he decides and
convinces the Directory that the best way to carry on

^ In liis Corsica!! period lie had actually dicained of entering
the Anglo-Indian service and coining back a rich nabob. See
Jung, Lricien Bonapa/rte et ses Memoi/res 1. p. 74.

40 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

the contest with England is by occupying Egypt,
and at the same time by stirring up Tippoo Sultan
to war with the Calcutta Government. And he
actually carries out this plan, so that the whole
struggle is transferred from the British Channel into
the boundless spaces of Greater Britain, and when
the Irish shortly afterwards rise, ihey find to their
bitter disappointment that France cannot spare them
Bonaparte, but only General Humbert with eleven
i hundred men.

When this war was brought to an end by the
treaty of Amiens in 1802, the results of it were such
as to make a great epoch in the history of Greater
Britain. In the first place Egypt is finally evacuated
by France, that is to say, Bonaparte's grand scheme
of attack against our Indian Empire has failed, his
ally Tippoo — Citoyen Tipou, as he was called — had
been defeated and slain some time before, and General
Baird had moved with an English force up the Ked
Sea to take part with General Hutchinson in the
expulsion of the French from Egypt. In the colonial
world at the same time England remained mistress of
Ceylon and Trinidad.

But the last war, that which lasted from 1803 to
1815, was this in any sense a war for the New
World 1 It does not seem to be so ; and naturally,
because England from the beginning had such a naval
superiority, that Napoleon could never again succeed in
making his way back into the New World. Never-
theless I believe that it was intended by Napoleon
to be so. In the first place look at the origin and

a ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 41

cause of it. It was at the outset a war for Malta,
By the treaty of Amiens, England had engaged with-
in a given time to evacuate Malta, and this for
certain reasons, which need not here be discussed, she
afterwards refused to do. Now why did Napoleon
want her to leave Malta, and why did she refuse to
do so ■? It was because Malta was the key of Egypt,
and she had good reason to believe that he would in
a moment reoccupy Egypt, and that the struggle for
India would begin again. Thus the war was ulti-
mately for India, though it was diverted into
Germany by the Third Coalition. Moreover, though
by the retention of Malta we did effectually and once
for all ward off this attack, yet we did not ourselves
know how successful we had been. We still believed
India to be full of French intrigue ; we believed the
Mahratta and Afghan princes and the Persian Shah
to be puppets worked by the French, as indeed they
had many French officers in their service. Probably
the great Mahratta War of 1803 seemed to Lord
Wellesley to be a part of the war with France, and
probably Arthur Wellesley believed that at Assaye
and Argaum he struck at the same enemy as after-
wards at Salamanca and Waterloo. The fact is that
Napoleon's intention in this war is obscured to us by
the grand failure of the maritime enterprise which he
has planned, and the grand success of the German
campaign which he has not planned. He drifts in a
direction he does not intend, yet the Continental Sj'stem
and the violent seizure of Spain and Portugal (great
New World Powers) show that he does not forget his

42 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

original object. Moreover, Colonel Malleson shows
in his Later Struggles of France in the East, what a
destructive privateering war the French were able to
keep up in the Indian Ocean from their island of
Mauritius long after their naval power had been
destroyed at Trafalgar. It was by the conquest of
this island and its retention at the Peace by England
that the Hundred Years' War of England and France
for the New World came to an end.

This general view of the wars of the eighteenth
century will show you that more is meant than might
at first appear by the statement that expansion is the
chief character of English history in the eighteenth
century. At first it seems merely to mean that the
conquest of Canada, India and South Africa are
greater events in intrinsic importance than such
European or domestic events as Marlborough's war,
or the succession of the House of Brunswick, or the
Jacobite rebellion, or even the war with the French
Revolution. It means in fact, as you will now see,
that these other great events which seem to have
nothing to do with the growth of Greater Britain,
were really closely connected with it, and were
indeed only successive moments in the great process.
At first it may seem to mean that the European
policy of England in that century is of less impor^
ance than its colonial policy. It really means that
the European policy and the colonial policy are but
different aspects of the same great national develop-
ment. And this, nay even more than this, is what
I desire to show. This single conception brings

II ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 43

together not only the European with the colonial
affairs, but also the military struggles with the whole
peaceful expansion of the country, with that indus- ^
trial and commercial growth, which during the same
century exceeded in England all previous example.
But in order to understand this it will be necessary
for us to examine the peculiar nature of the English
colonisation of the New World.

LECTURE III

THE EMPIRE

The expression " Colonial Empire " is familiar to us,
and yet there is something strange in the juxtaposition
of words. The word Empire seems too military and
despotic to suit the relation of a mother-country to
colonies.

There are two very different kinds of colonisation.
First there is a kind which may be called natural, in
the sense that it has manifest analogies in the natural
world. "Colonies are like fruits which only cling
till they ripen," said Turgot. Colonisation, say
others, is like the swarming of bees ; or it is like the
marriage and migration to another house of the
grown-up son. And no doubt history furnishes us
with real examples of such easy and natural colonisa-
tion. The primitive migrations may often have been
of this kind. In the first chapters of European
history, in the earliest traditions of Greece and Italy,
which show us the Greco-Italian branch of the Aryan
family in the act of occupying the territory which

LECT. in THE EMPIRE 45

was afterwards to be the scene of its greatness, we
see this easy process going on under the influence of
primitive ideas. We read of the institution called
ver sacrum, by which all the children born in one
spring would be dedicated to some deity, who was
supposed to accept emigration in lieu of sacrifice ; ^
the votaries accordingly, when they grew up, were ■
driven across the frontier, and sometimes they
settled and founded a city on the spot where an
animal accidentally overtaken on the journey, in
whom they saw a guide sent by the god, had chanced
to stop. From such a sacred animal we are told that
some cities, e.g. Bovianum and Picenum, received
their name.

This may be called perhaps natural colonisation,
but out of such a system there could grow no colonial
empire. Accordingly the Greek airoiKia, though
the word is translated colony, was essentially different
in fact from the modern colony. By a colony we
understand a community which is not merely deriva-
tive, but which remains politically connected in a
relation of dependence with the parent community.
Now the Greek airoiKLa was not such a dependent
community. Technically it was entirely independent
of the mother - state, though the sense of kindred
commonly held it in a condition of permanent alliance.
The dependency indeed was by no means unknown

^ Thus Paulus : Magnis periculis adducti vovehant Itali
quaecunque proximo vere nata essent apud se auinialia immo-
laturos. Sed quom crudele videretur piieros ac puellas innocentes
interficere, perductos in adultam aetatem velabaut atque ita extra
fiues suos ezieebaot.

46 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect

to the Greeks. Subordinate governments "were often
among them established by a State in a community
outside itself. But among the Greeks the dependency
was not a colony, as the colony was not a de-
pendency.

The Latin colonia was no doubt dependent enough,
but it was an institution so peculiar, being a sort of
contrivance for the purpose of garrisoning conquered
territory without the expense of maintaining an
army in it, that we need not discuss it further here.

It is a remarkable and fundamental fact that the
old primitive system of the Greeks has not been
revived in modern times. The colonisation which
began with the discovery of Columbus, or more
strictly with the conquest of the Canaries by Bethen-
court in 1404, has been on a vast scale ; it has
peopled a territory more extensive a hundredfold
than the few Mediterranean islands and peninsulas
which those primitive Greek adventurers occupied,
yet nowhere, I think, did the mother-state willingly
allow its emigrants to form independent communities.
Whatever license might be allowed to the first
adventurers, to a Cortez or Pizarro, Avhatever formid-
able powers of levying armies and making war or
peace might be granted, for example, to our East
India Company, the State nevertheless retained
invariably the supreme control in its hands, except
where a successful rebellion forced it out of them.
Though it seems not to have occurred to Corinth
that it could possibly carry on government at the
distance of Sicily, on the other hand it seems just as

Ill THE EMPIKE 47

little to have occurred to the Spanish or Portuguese
or Dutch or French or English Governments that
their emigrants could pretend to independence on
the ground that they were hidden away in the
Pampas of South America or in the Archipelagos of
the Pacific Ocean.

The modern system may be less natural if by
" natural " we mean " instinctive," but if we mean by
it " reasonable," which is surely different, we must not
call it unnatural simply because it is not the system
of bees or of plants. At any rate let us not take up
at once the scolding strain, and say, " See the con-
trast between the humane wisdom of the ancient
world and the tyranny of the Gothic Middle Ages !
The Goth never relaxes for any distance his barbar-
ous system of constraint ; the mild intelligent Greek,
guided by nature, perceives that the grown-up child
has a right to be independent, and so he blesses him
and bids him farewell."

Perhaps if we examine the circumstances of the
modern colonisation we shall see that it grew
as inevitably out of them as the instinctive system
grew out of the conditions of the ancient world.

The appropriation by a settled community of lands
on the other side of an ocean is wholly different from
the gradual diffusion of a race over a continuous
territory or across narrow seas. Slight motives
calling into operation moderate forces may suffice for
the latter, but the former demands a prodigious
leverage. In the life of Colombus it may be re-
marked that he needs the help of the State at every

48 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

turn. It is the State which has equipped him and paid
the expense of the discovery. Moreover when the
discovery is made, it is observable that no irresistible
impulse prompts the Europeans to take advantage of
it. When the floodgates are thrown open, there is
no stream ready to flow, for in Europe at that time
there was no superfluous population seeking an outlet,
only individual adventurers ready to go in search of
gold. Columbus can make no progress but by
proving to the Sovereigns that the territory he dis-
covers will yield revenue to them. In these circum-
stances the State, as its help was always needed, had
the less difficulty in maintaining its authority.

We may observe also that the modern State almost
necessarily colonises in a difi'erent way, because its
nature is different from that of the Greek State. The
Greek mind identifies the State and City so completely
that the language, as you know, has but one word for
both. Aristotle, though he knew of country-states
such as Macedonia and Persia, yet in his Politics
seems almost to omit them from consideration. Fre-
quently he lays down principles from which it appears
that he could not bring himself to regard them as
states in the proper sense of the word, because they
were not cities. The modern idea on the other hand
— few of us know how modern it is, or how gi-adually
it has been formed — is that the people of one nation,
speaking one language, ought in general to have one
government.

Now it is evident that these difi'erent ideas of the
State involve of necessity different ideas of the effect

in THE EMPIRE 49

of emigration. If the State is the City, it follows
that he who goes out of the City goes out of the
State. Hence the Greek view of the colony was
natural to the Greeks, for those Greeks who under-
took to form a new city (7roXt9,) did ipso facto and
inevitably undertake to form a new state. But if the
State is the Nation (not the Country, observe, but the
Nation), then we see a sufficient ground for the
universal usage of modern states, which has been to
regard their emigrants not as going out of the State
but as carrying the State with them. The notion was,
WTiere Englishmen are there is England, where French-
men are there is France, and so the possessions of
France in North America were called New France,
and one group at least of the English possessions New
England.

It is involved in this, but it is so important that it
must be stated separately, that the organisation of the
modern State admits of unbounded territorial ex-
tension, while that of the ancient State did not. The
Greek iroXi'i, as it actually was a city, could not be
modified so as to become anything else. I must
never be tired of quoting that passage of the Politics
which is so infinitely important to the student of
political science, where Aristotle lays it doAvn that
the State must be of moderate population, because
" who could command it in war, if the population were
excessive, or what herald short of a Stentor could speak
to them^ (ti9 8e Krjpv^ firj ^revropeto^ ;)." The
modern State, being already as large as a country,
would bear to become larger. Either it had no
s

50 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.

national assemblies, as was practically the case with
France and Spain, or its national assembly, as in
the case of England, was representative — that is to
say, was expressly contrived to overcome the diffi-
culty of bringing together the whole body of the
citizens.

I have indulged in these general reflections upon
the nature of modern colonisation in order that we
may understand what our Empire is, and how it
necessarily came into existence. There might easily
have been a great emigration from England which
would not in any way have enlarged the English
State. For by Greater Britain we mean an enlarge-
ment of the English State, and not simply of the
English nationality. It is not simply that a popula-
tion of English blood is now found in Canada and in
Australia, as in old time a Greek population was
spread over Sicily, South Italy and the Western
Coast of Asia Minor. That was an extension of the
Nationality but not of the State, an extension which
gave no new strength, and did not in any way help
the Greek name when it was attacked and conquered
from Macedonia. In like manner at present we see
a constant stream of emigration from Germany to
America, but no Greater Germany comes into exist-
ence, because these emigrants, though they carry
with them and may perhaps not altogether lose their
language and their ideas, do not carry with them
their State. This is the case with Germany because
its emigration has happened too late, when the New
World is already carved into States, into which its

Ill THE EMPIRE 51

emigrants are compelled to enter, as with Greece it
was the result of a theory of the State, which identi-
fied it with the City. But Greater Britain is a real
enlargement of the English State; it carries across
the seas not merely the English race, but the
authority of the English Government. We call it for
want of a better word an Empire. And it does re-
semble the great Empires of history in this respect,
that it is an aggregate of provinces, each of which has
a government sent out to it from the political head-
quarters, which is a kind of delegation from the
supreme government. But yet it is wholly unlike
the great Empires of the Old World, Persian or
Macedonian or Roman or Turkish, because it is not
in the main founded on conquest, and because in the
main the inhabitants of the distant provinces are of
the same nation as those of the dominant country.
It resembles them in its vast extent, but it does not
resemble them in that violent military character
which has made most Empires short-lived and liable
to speedy decay.

We may see now out of what conditions it arose.
It is the only considerable survivor of a family of
great Empires, which arose out of the contact of the
Western States of Europe with the New World so
suddenly laid open by Vasco da Gama and Columbus.
What England did, was done equally by Spain,
Portugal, France and Holland. There was once a
Greater Spain, a Greater Portugal, a Greater France
and a Greater Holland, as well as a Greater Britain,
but from various causes those four Empires have

52 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lkct.

either perished or have become insignificant. Greater
Spain disappeared and Greater Portugal lost its
largest province Brazil half a century ago in wars of
independence similar to that which tore from us our
American colonies. Greater France and a large part
of Greater Holland were lost in war and became
merged in Greater Britain. Greater Britain itself
after suffering one severe shock has survived to the
present day, and remains the single monument of a
state of the world which has almost passed away.
At the same time it differs in a very essential point
from some of those Empires.

The countries which were suddenly thrown open
to Europe at the end of the fifteenth century fall into
three classes. Vasco da Gama threw open countries
in which for the most part ancient and extensive
states existed, such as the adventurers did not for a
long time think of subverting. Columbus on the
other hand discovered a Continent in which only two
such states appeared to exist, and even these were
soon proved to have no solidity. The contact which
Columbus established, being the most strange and
violent which ever took place between two parts of
the human family, led to a fierce struggle and furnished
one of the most terrible pages to the annals of the world.
But in this struggle there was no sort of equality.
The American race had no more power of resisting
the European than the sheep has of resisting the
wolf. Even where it was numerous and had a settled
polity, as in Peru, it could make no resistance ; its
states were crushed, the ruling families extinguished,

Ill THE EMPIRE 53

and the population itself reduced to a form of slavery.
Everywhere therefore the country fell into the hands
of the immigrating race, and was disposed of at its
pleasure as so much plunder. The immigrants did
not merely, as in India, gradually show a great
military superiority to the native race, so as in the end
to subdue them, but overwhelmed them at once like
a party of hunters suddenly assailing a herd of
antelopes. This was the case everywhere, but yet
the countries of America also fall into two classes.
There was a great difference between the regions of
Central and Southern America, which fell principally
to the Spanish and Portuguese, and the North
American territories, which fell to England. In
Mexico, Peru and some other parts of South America
the native population, though feeble compared to the
Europeans, was not insignificant in numbers ; it was
counted by millions, had reached the agricultural
stage of civilisation, and had cities. But the tribes
of Indians which wandered over the territories of
North America, which noAv belong to the United
States and the Dominion of Canada, were much
more insignificant. It has been estimated that " the
total Indian population within the territory of the
United States east of the Rocky Mountains, did not
at any time subsequent to the discovery of America
exceed, if indeed it even reached, three hundred
thousand individuals." Accordingly, whereas in New
Spain the European, though supreme, yet lived in the
midst of a population of native Indians, the European in
North America supplanted the native race entirely,

54 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

pushed it ever farther back as he advanced, and did
not blend with it at all.

It was ultimately the fortune of England to ac-
quire the most important share both of what Vasco
da Gama and of what Columbus laid open. On one
side has grown up her Indian, and mainly on the
other her Colonial Empire. But of the latter group
of countries, the countries wanting in strong states,
England occupied those which were comparatively
empty, and the Australian territory which has since
fallen to her is in the same condition. This fact has
an all-important consequence.

I remarked before that Greater Britain is an ex-
tension of the English State and not merely of the
English nationality. But it is an equally striking
characteristic of Greater Britain that nevertheless it
is an extension of the English nationality. When a
nationality is extended without any extension of the
State, as in the case of the Greek colonies, there may
be an increase of moral and intellectual influence, but
there is no increase of political power. On the other
hand, when the State advances beyond the limits of
the nationality, its power becomes precarious and
artificial. This is the condition of most empires ; it
is the condition for example of our own empire in
India. The English State is powerful there, but the
English nation is but an imperceptible drop in the
ocean of an Asiatic population. And when a nation
extends itself into other territories the chances are
that it will there meet with other nationalities which
it cannot destroy or completely drive out, even if it

in THE EMPIRE 56

succeeds in conquering them. When this happens,
it has a great and permanent difficulty to contend
with. The subject or rival nationalities cannot be
perfectly assimilated, and remain as a permanent
cause of weakness and danger. It has been the for-
tune of England in extending itself to evade on the
whole this danger. For it has occupied parts of the
globe which were so empty that they offered an un-
bounded scope for new settlement. There was land
for every emigrant who chose to come, and the native
races were not in a condition sufficiently advanced to
withstand even the peaceful competition, much less
the power, of the immigrants.

This statement is true on the whole. The English
Empire is on the whole free from that weakness which
has brought down most empires, the weakness of being
a mere mechanical forced union of alien nationalities.
It is sometimes described as an essentially feeble
union which could not bear the slightest shock, with
what reason I may examine later, but it has the
fundamental strength which most empires and some
commonwealths want. Austria for instance is divided
by the nationality-rivalry of German, Slav, and Mag-
yar ; the Swiss Confederation unites three languages,
but the English Empire in the main and broadly may
be said to be English throughout.

Of course, however, considerable abatements are to
be made. It is only in one of the four great groups,
namely, in the Australian colonies, that the statement
is true almost without qualification. The native
Australian race is so low in the ethnological scale

56 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.

that it can never give the least trouble, but even
here, since we reckon New Zealand in this group, we
are to bear in mind that the Maori tribes occupy the
Northern island in some force, much as in the last
century the Highland Clans gave us trouble in the
northern part of our own island, and the Maori is by
no means a contemptible type of man. Nevertheless
the whole number of Maories is not supposed to
exceed forty thousand, and it is rapidly diminishing.
When we turn to another group, the North American
colonies, included principally in the Dominion of
Canada, we find that the nucleus of it was acquired
originally, not by English settlement, but by the con-
quest of French settlements. At the outset therefore
the nationality-difficulty, instead of being absent here,
was present in the gravest form. The original Canada
of the French was afterwards known as Lower Canada,
and since the establishment of the Dominion it has
borne the name of the Province of Quebec. It has a
population of nearly a million and a half, while the
whole Dominion does not contain four millions and a
half. These are Frenchmen and Catholics in the
midst of a population mainly English and Protestant.
It is not so long since the inconvenience of this alien
population was felt in Canada by discords essentially
similar to those which the nationality-question has
created in Austria and Russia. The Canadian Re-
bellion which marked the first years of the reign of
Queen Victoria, was in fact a war of nationality in
the British Empire, though it wore the disguise of a
war of liberty, as Lord Durham expressly remarks

Ill THE EMPIRE 57

in the opening of his famous Report on Canada : " I
expected to find a contest between a government and
a people ; I found two nations warring in the bosom
of a single state ; I found a struggle not of principles
but of races." It is however to be remarked on the
other side that here too the alien element dwindles,
and is likely ultimately to be lost in the English
immigration, and also that its animosity has been
much pacified by the introduction of federal in-
stitutions.

In the third or West Indian group also the differ-
ences of nationality are considerable. Here almost
alone in our Empire are to be traced the eff"ects of
the peculiar phenomenon of the history of the New
World, negro slavery. Here it first appeared on a
considerable scale, as the immediate result of the
discovery of Columbus. So long as it lasted, it did
not call into existence the nationality-difficulty, for a
thoroughly enslaved nation is a nation no longer, and
a servile insurrection is wholly different from the
insurrection of an oppressed nationality. But when
slavery is abolished, while the slaves themselves re-
main, stamped so visibly in colour and physical type
with the badge of their different nationality, yet now
free and laying claim to citizenship, then it is that
the nationality-difl^iculty begins to threaten. But in
the West-Indian group such difficulties for the present
do not take a serious form, because the colonies are
in the main dispersed in small islands and have no
community of feeling.

It is in the fourth or South African group that

58 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect

the nationality-difficulty is most serious. It is here
a double difficulty. There have been two conquests,
the one superinduced upon the other. The Dutch
first settled themselves among the native races, and
then the Dutch colony was conquered by England.
So far the case may seem to resemble that of Canada,
where the French settled among the Indians and were
then conquered by the English. But there are two
differences. In the first place the native tribes of
South Africa, instead of disappearing and dwindling
before the whites, greatly outnumber them, and show
a power of combination and progress such as the Red
Indian never showed. Thus in the census of 1875 I
find that the Cape Colony had a total population of
nearly three quarters- of a million, but two out of the
three quarters were native and only one European.
And behind this native population dwelling among the
settlers there is an indefinite native population ex-
tending without limit into the interior of the vast
continent. But secondly the other difficulty, which
arises from the fact that the settlers themselves were
at the outset not English but Dutch, does not diminish
or tend to disappear, as it has done in Canada. In
Canada there took place a rapid immigration of Eng-
lish, who, showing themselves in a marked degree
more energetic than the French and increasing much
faster, gradually gave the whole community a pre-
dominantly English character, so that in fact the
rising of the French in 1838 was the convulsion of
despair of a sinking nationality. Nothing similar
has happened in South Africa, no rapid English im-

Ill THE EMPIRE 69

migration has come to give a new character to the
community.

These are the abatements which must be made to
the general proposition that Greater Britain is homo-
geneous in nationality. They need not prevent us
from laying down this general proposition as true.
If in these islands we feel ourselves for all purposes
one nation, though in Wales, in Scotland and in
Ireland there is Celtic blood, and Celtic languages
utterly unintelligible to us are still spoken, so in the
Empire a good many French and Dutch and a good
many Caffres and Maories may be admitted without
marring the ethnological unity of the whole.

This ethnological unity is of great importance
when we would form an opinion about the stability
and chance of duration of the Empire. . The chief
forces which hold a community together and cause it
to constitute one State are three, common nationalit}',
common religion, and common interest. These may
act in various degrees of intensity, and they may also
act singly or in combination. Now when it is argued
that Greater Britain is a union which will not last long
and will soon fall to pieces, the ground taken is that
it wants the third of these binding forces, that it is
not held together by community of interest. " What,"
it is said, " can the inhabitants of Australia and New
Zealand, living on the other side of the Tropic of
Capricorn, have in common with ourselves who live
beyond the 50th degree of north latitude? Who
does not see tliat two communities so remote from
each other cannot long continue parts of one political

60 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

whole 1 " Now this is a very important consideration,
especially as it is backed by the impressive fact that
our American Colonies did in the last century find
their union with us intolerable. But, allowing its
importance, we may remark that, even if this bond
is wanting, the other two bonds which hold states
together are not wanting. Many empires in which
hostile nationalities and religions have been but
artificially united have nevertheless lasted several
centuries, but Greater Britain is not a mere empire,
though we often call it so. Its union is of the more
vital kind. It is united by blood and religion, and
though circumstances may be imagined in which
these ties might snap, yet they are strong ties, and
will only give way before some violent dissolving
force.

I have enlarged in this lecture upon the essential
nature of our colonial Empire, because there is much
ambiguity both about the word " colonial " and about
the word "Empire." Our colonies do not resemble the
colonies which classical students meet with in Greek
and Eoman history, and our Empire is not an Empire
at all in the ordinary sense of the word. It does not
consist of a congeries of nations held together by
force, but in the main of one nation, as much as if it
were no Empire but an ordinary state. This fact is
fundamental when we look to the future and inquire
whether it is calculated for duration.

But I have also enlarged upon the whole class of
Empires which sprang out of the discovery of the New
World, to which class our own Empire belongs, in

Ill THE EMPIRE 61

order that we may understand the past. England in
the eighteenth century is regarded, I said, too much
as a European insular State and too little as an
American and Asiatic Empire ; in short, we think of
Great Britain too much and of Greater Britain too
little. But the misconception spreads further, for in
that century there is also a Greater France, a Greater
Holland, a Greater Portugal, and a Greater Spain,
and all these we overlook as we overlook Greater
Britain.

Here is a fundamental characteristic of the
European States during the eighteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, which is seldom borne in mind,
namely that each of the five Western States has an
Empire in the New World attached to it. Before the
seventeenth century this condition of things was but
beginning, and since the eighteenth it has ceased
again to exist. The vast immeasurable results of the
discovery of Columbus were developed with extreme
slowness, so that the whole sixteenth century passed
away before most of these nations bestiiTcd them-
selves to claim a share in the New World. There
existed no independent Holland till near the end of
that century, so that a furtiori there could be no
Greater Holland, nor did either England or France
in that century become possessors of colonies.
France did indeed plan a settlement in North
America, as the name Carolina, derived from Charles
IX. of Fi'ance, still remains to prove, but the neigh-
bouring Spaniards of Florida interfered to destroy it.
A little later Sir Walter Raleigh's colony in the same

62 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect,

neighbourhood disappeared altogether, leaving no
trace behind it. Accordingly during almost the
whole of that century the New World remained in
the possession of the two States which had done most
to lay it open, viz. Spain and Portugal, Spain look-
ing chiefly towards America and Portugal towards
Asia, until in 1580 the two States coalesced in a
union which lasted sixty years. The Dutch made
their grand entrance into the competition for empire
in the seven years from 1595 to 1602, and they were
followed by France and England in the early years of
the seventeenth century, that is, in the reign of our
King James I.

Again in the nineteenth century the competition
of these five states in the New World ceased. It
ceased from two causes : wars of independence, in
which Transatlantic colonies severed themselves from
the mother-country, and the colonial conquests of
England. I have described already the Hundred
Years' War in which Greater France was swallowed
up in Greater Britain ; Greater Holland in like manner
suffered serious diminution, losing the Cape of Good
Hope and Demerara to England, though even now a
Greater Holland may be said to exist in the magni-
ficent dependency of Java, with a population of not
less than nineteen millions. The fall of Greater
Spain and Greater Portugal has happened in the
present century within the lifetime of many who are
still among us. If we estimated occurrences less by
the excitement they cause at the moment and more
by the consequences which are certain to follow them,

Ill THE EMPIRE 63

we should call this one of the most stupendous events
in the history of the globe, for it is the beginning of
the independent life of almost the Avhole of Southern
and Central America. It took place mainly in the
twenties of this century, and was the result of a
series of rebellions which, when we inquire into their
origin, we find to have arisen out of the shock given
to Spain and Portugal by Napoleon's invasion of them,
so that in fact one of the chief, if not the chief, result
of Napoleon's career has been the fall of Greater
Spain and Greater Portugal, and the independence of
South America.

The result of all these mighty revolutions — of
which however I fancy that few of you know any-
thing— is that the Western States of Europe, with the
exception of England, have been in the main severed
again from the New World. This of course is only
roughly true. Spain still possesses Cuba and Porto
Rico, Portugal still has large African possessions, France
has begun to found a new Empire in North Africa.
Nevertheless these four states have materially altered
their position in the world. They have become in
the main purely European States again, as they were
before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. It is easy to
show you the immense magnitude of this change.
Spain has lately passed through a disturbed time.
She expelled a Bourbon sovereign and tried for a
time the experiment of a Republic. This change was
doubtless very serious in the peninsula, but it pro-
duced wonderfully little excitement in the world at
large. Now if anything similar had happened in the

64 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

eighteenth or in the seventeenth century, the shock
of it would have been felt over a great part of the
planet. From Mexico to Buenos Ayres, from above
the Tropic of Cancer to below the Tropic of Capricorn,
every territory probably would have been convulsed
with rebellion and civil war. In like manner the
recent calamities in France would in the eighteenth
century have shaken the St. Lawrence, the Great
Lakes of North America and the Mississippi, and
have influenced the policy of princes in the Deccan
and the valley of the Ganges, nay perhaps have
altered the balance of Hindostan. As it was, those
calamities were nearly confined to France itself ; else-
where sympathies were excited, but interests were
not touched.

Thus then we see in the seventeenth and still more
the eighteenth century a period when the New World
was attached in a peculiar way to the five Western
States of the European system. This attachment
modifies and determines all the wars and negotiations,
all the international relations of Europe during that
period. In the last lecture I pointed out that the
struggle between England and France in those
centuries cannot be understood so long as we look at
Europe alone, and that the belligerents are really the
World-Powers, Greater Britain and Greater France.
Now I remark that in like manner during the same
period we must always read for Holland, Portugal,
and Spain, Greater Holland, Greater Portugal, and
Greater Spain. I remark also that this state of
things has now passed away, that the Spanish Empire,

Ill THE EMPIEE 65

and in the main also the Portuguese and Dutch
Empires, have gone the same way as the Empire of
France. But Greater Britain still remains. And
thus we perceive the historical origin and character
of this Empire. It is the sole survivor of a whole
family of Empires, which arose out of the action of
the discovery of the New World upon the peculiar
condition and political ideas of Europe. All these
Empires were beset by certain dangers, which Greater
Britain alone has hitherto escaped, though she too
has felt the shock of them and is still exposed to
them, and the great question now is whether she can
modify her defective constitution in such a way as
to escape them for the future.

LECTURE IV

THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM

I REMARKED that ancient Greek colonisation, com-
pared with the modern system, might be called in a
certain sense the natural system. And yet the
modern system might be represented as natural also.
The Greeks regard the State as essentially small, and
infer that a surplus population can only be accommo-
dated by founding another State. But is there any-
thing necessarily unnatural in the other view, that
the State is capable of indefinite growth and expan-
sion "J The ripe fruit dropping from the tree and
giving rise to another tree may be natural, but so is
the acorn spreading into the huge oak, that has
hundreds of branches and thousands of leaves. If
Miletus among its daughter-cities may remind us of
the one, England expanding into Greater Britain
resembles the other.

And yet surely there must be something unnatural
in the system against which our own colonists revolted
a hundred years ago, and the colonists of Spain and
Portugal a few years later

LECT. IV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 67

The truth is that the simple idea of expansion has
seldom been conceived or realised clearly.

Let us work out a little in our minds the concep-
tion of a Greater Britain, of the English State
extended indefinitely without being altered. The
question is often asked, What is the good of colonies ?
but no such question could possibly be raised, if
colonies really were such a simple extension of the
mother-state. Whether this extension is practicable
may be questioned, but it cannot be questioned that
if it were practicable it would be desirable.

We must begin by recognising that the unoccupied
territory of the globe is to those who take possession
of it so much wealth in the most absolute sense of the
word. The epitaph which said that to Leon and Aragon
Columbus gave a new world was almost literally true.
He conferred upon certain persons a large landed
estate, and if, as the result, many poor people did
not become rich and many unfortunate people pros-
perous, the fault must have lain in the distribution or
administration of the wealth which he conferred.
By his discovery the nations of Europe came in for a
landed estate so enormously large that it might easily
have converted every poor man in Europe into a
landed proprietor.

But one thing was necessary before all this wealth
could be reduced into possession and enjoyment.
Property can exist only under the guardianship of
the State. In order therefore that the lands of the
New World might become secure enjoyable property,
States must be set up in the New World. Without the

68 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

State the settler "would run the risk of being murdered
by Indians, or attacked by rival settlers of some
hostile nationality. On the other hand suppose the
reign of law and government established in the New
World, as in Europe, so that property is equally
secure, then the poor man in Europe who finds life
painful and the acquisition of land in these crowded
countries utterly beyond his power, has only to
transfer himself to the New World, where land is
cheaper, and he is at once enriched as much as if he
had received a legacy.

Thus there, can be no dispute about the value of
organised States in the less crowded parts of the globe.
But why should these be our own colonies ? There
is nothing to prevent the emigrant from settling in
a colony belonging to some different European State
or in an independent State. Why need we trouble
ourselves therefore to keep up colonies of our own ?

This is a strange question, which would never be
asked in England but for an exceptional circumstance.
Most people like to live among their own country-
men, under the laws, religion and institutions they
are accustomed to. They place themselves moreover
most really and practically at a disadvantage by
going to live among people who speak a different
language. As a matter of fact, we do not find that,
the course of emigration being free, any large number
of Englishmen yearly settle in those New World
States which are really foreign, that is, in the South
American Republics or in Brazil or in Mexico.
There would be no question at all about the value of

IV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 69

colonies, and we should all as a matter of course
consider that only by means of colonies was it
possible to bring the wealth of the New World
within the reach of our population, if it were not for
the existence of the United States. But the United
States are to us almost as good as a colony ; our
people can emigrate thither without sacrificing their
language or chief institutions or habits. And the
Union is so large and prosperous and fills our view
so much, that we forget how very exceptional its
relation to us is, and also that if it is to us almost as
good as a colony, this is only because it was con-
structed out of English colonies. In estimating the
value of colonies in the abstract, we shall only confuse
ourselves by recollecting this unique case ; we ought
to put the United States entirely out of view.

Considered in the abstract then, colonies are
neither more nor less than a great augmentation of
the national estate. They are lands for the landless,
prosperity and wealth for those in straitened cir-
cumstances. This is a very simple view, and yet it
is much overlooked, as if somehow it were too simple
to be understood. History offers many examples of
nations cramped for want of room; it records in many
cases how they swarmed irresistibly across their
frontiers and spread like a deluge over neighbouring
countries, where sometimes they found lands and
wealth. Now we may be very sure that never any
nation was half so much cramped for want of room in
the olden time as our own nation is now. Populations
so dense as that of modern England are a phenomenon

70 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT,

quite new at least in Europe. We continually speak
of our country as crowded, and, since the rate of increase
of population is tolerably constant, we sometimes ask
with alarm what will be its condition half a century
hence. "The territory," we say, "is a fixed quantity;
we have but 120,000 square miles; it is crowded already
and yet the population doubles in some seventy years.
What will become of us ? " Now here is a curious
example of our habit of leaving our colonial posses-
sions out of account. What ! our country is small ;
a poor, 120,000 square miles ? I find the fact to be
very difi"erent. I find that the territory governed by
the Queen is of almost boundless extent. Let us
deduct from the vast total India, as not much open
to settlement, still the territory subject to the Queen
is much greater than that of the United States, though
that is uniformly cited as the example of a country
not crowded and in which there is boundless room for
expansion. It may be true that the mother-country
of this great Empire is crowded, but in order to
relieve the pressure it is not necessary for us, as if we
were Goths or Turcomans, to seize upon the territory
of our neighbours, it is not necessary even to incur
great risks or undergo great hardships ; it is only
necessary to take possession of boundless territories
in Canada, South Africa and Australia, where already
our language is spoken, our religion professed, and
our laws established. If there is pauperism in Wilt-
shire and Dorsetshire, this is but complementary
to unowned wealth in Australia; on the one side
there are men without property, on the other there

IV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 71

is property waiting for men. And yet we do not
allow these two facts to come together in our minds,
but brood anxiously and almost despairingly over
the problem of pauperism, and when colonies are
mentioned we ask. What is the good of colonies ?

Partly no doubt this is due simply to a want of-
system in our way of thinking on subjects of this
kind, but partly also it is evident that colonies have
never been regarded in England as a simple extension
of the English state and nation over new territory.
They have been thought of no doubt as belonging to
England, though precariously, but at the same time
as outside of England, so that what goes out of
England to them is in a manner lost to England.
This appears clearly from the argument which is often
urged against emigration on any large scale, viz. that
it might be good for the emigrants, but that it would
be ruinous to England, which would be deprived of
all the best and hardiest part of its population —
deprived, for it is not imagined that such emigrants
could remain Englishmen, or be still serviceable to
the English commonwealth. Compare this view of
emigration with that taken in the United States,
where the constant movement of the population
westward, the constant settlement of new Territories,
which in due time rise to be States, is not regarded
as either a symptom or a cause of weakness,
not at all as a draining-out of vitality, but on the
contrary as the greatest evidence of vigour and the
best means of increasing it.

We have not really then as yet a Greater Britain.

72 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

When I speak of the creation of Greater Britain
during the eighteenth century, I in a certain sense
exaggerate. In our colonial Empire was laid the
foundation of a Greater Britain, and a Greater Britain
may in the end arise out of it, but nothing of the
kind was originally intended, nor later was the true
significance of what had taken place perceived. A
colony was not really thought of as an extension of
the mother-state, but as something different. What
then was the precise conception formed of a colony t
We find ourselves forced to ask this question again.

I have pointed out already that in the sixteenth
century there was no natural overflow of population
from Europe into the New World. Europe was not
over-peopled; there was no imperious demand for
more room. Why then should the conception, so
natural to us in these days, of a territorial extension
of the State occur to those who lived at the time
of the discoveries? We see on the contrary that
contemporary statesmen were puzzled to decide what
use could be made, and even doubted whether any
use could be made, of the new lands. Sebastian
Cabot is encouraged by Henry VII., until it is found
that he does not bring back spices; then he is
neglected, and abandons England for the Spanish
service.-^ Thus the same cause which made it neces-
sary to call in the help of the State led to a peculiarly
materialistic view of the work of settlement. What
the State wanted was revenue; hence it became

1 Schanz, JHhiglische Handelspolitik. Read the whole chapter
entitled, Die Stdlung der bdden ersten Tudors zu den Entdechungen.

TV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 73

necessary to regard the new countries rather as so
much wealth to be transported into Europe than as a
new seat for European civilisation.

I spoke before of natural colonisation, intending
such colonisation as results from the spread of a race
over an unbounded territory at a time when political
institutions are in their infancy. The colonisation of
the sixteenth century is curiously different. It arises
from the discovery of remote regions of unknown
wealth by nations accustomed to a limited space and
to a rigorous government. As in the former kind the
State scarcely appears, but individuals or rather tribes
accomplish the work, and in making a new settle-
ment make a new state, in the latter kind the State
takes the lead, superintends the settlement, recruits
for it, holds it in subjection when it is made, and, as
a consequence, looks to make a profit out of it. At
first sight this latter system might seem less material-
istic than the other, for it conceives the State as
resting not upon mere locality but upon kindred ; but
it becomes more materialistic in practice because it
looks at the colony purely with the eyes of the
Government, and therefore from a purely fiscal point
of view. Hence in the first settlement of America
the conception of a Spanish colony as an extension of
Spain was mixed up with a different conception of it
as a possession belonging to Spain. And whereas the
first conception, though it was formed instinctively,
yet answered to nothing in experience, — for who had
ever heard of two parts of the same State separated
by the whole breadth of the Atlantic Ocean 1 — the

74 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

second conception was less embarrassing in practice
because it was by no means new. There had been
examples in the Middle Ages of States possessing
dependencies separated from them by the sea, and I
daresay it might be possible to show that the Spanish
Council of the Indies was guided at times by the
precedents afforded by Venice in its dealings with
Candia and with its dependencies in the Adriatic.
The Venetian conception of a dependency was purely
selfish and commercial. So far from thinking of it as
forming part of the Republic, they regarded it as so
much live stock forming part of the wealth of the
Republic. Thus it was by confounding together two
theories radically inconsistent with each other that
the modern colonial system, first formed by Spain and
adopted with more or less modification by the other
Powers of Europe, came into existence.

Now we have this conception more or less distinctly
in our minds whenever we ask the question, What is
the good of colonies ? That question implies that we
think of a colony, not as part of our State, but as a
possession belonging to it. For we should think it
absurd to raise such a question about a recognised
part of the body politic. Who ever thought of
inquiring whether Cornwall or Kent rendered any
• sufficient return for the money which we lay out upon
them, whether those counties were worth keeping 1
The tie that holds together the parts of a nation-
state is of another kind ; it is not composed of con-
siderations of profit and loss, but is analogous to the
family bond. The same tie would hold a nation to

IV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 75

its colonies, if colonies were regarded as simply an
extension of the nation. If Greater Britain in the
full sense of the phrase really existed, Canada and
Australia would be to us as Kent and Cornwall. But
if once we cease to regard a colony in this way, if we
consider that the emigrants, who have gone forth
from us, have ceased to belong to our community,
then we must form some other conception of their
relation to us. And this must either be the old Greek
conception which treats them as grown-up children
who have married and settled at a distance, so that
the family bond has dissolved away by the mere
necessity of circumstances, or if the connection is
maintained, as the modern States insisted on main-
taining it, it must change its character. It must rest
on interest. The question must be asked. What is
the good of the colony 1 and it must be answered by
some proof that the colony considered as a piece of
property, or as an investment of public money, pays.
Now this may be a very good basis for the union
of two countries, provided the benefit received from
the union is mutual. In this case it constitutes a
federation, and there are many instances in which,
without any tie of kindred, countries have been held
together in such a union simply by the sense of a
common interest. Among these instances are Austria
and Hungary, the German, French and Italian cantons
of the Swiss Confederation. Such would be the case
of our own Empire, if not only we ourselves felt that
our colonies paid — that is, that we reaped some
advantage from them which we should cease to reap if

76 EXPANSION OF ENGLAIrt) LECT.

they became independent — but also the colonies felt
that the mother-country paid, and that they gained
something by the connection with it. And in the
present day it is quite easy to imagine such a sense
of common interest existing between us and even the
remotest of our colonies, because in the present day
distance has been almost abolished by steam and
electricity. But in the first ages after the discovery
of the New World such a common interest was less
possible. The Atlantic Ocean was then for practical
purposes a far deeper and wider gulf, across which
any reciprocal exchange of services could not easily
take place. And so the old colonial system in
general had not the character of an equal federation.
It is the custom to describe the old colonies as
sacrificed to the mother-country. We must be careful
not to admit that statement without qualification.
It is supposed for instance that the revolt of otir own
American colonies was provoked by the selfish
treatment of the mother-country, which shackled their
trade without rendering them any benefit in return
for these restraints. This is far from being true.
Between England and the American colonies there
was a real interchange of services. England gave
defence in return for trade-privileges. In the middle
of the last century, at the time when the American
quarrel began, it was perhaps rather the colonies than
the mother-country that had fallen into arrear. We
had been involved in two great wars mainly by our
colonies, and the final breach was provoked not so
much by the pressure of England upon the colonies

IV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 77

as by that of the colonies upon England. If we
imposed taxes upon them, it was to meet the debt
which we had incurred in their behalf, and we saw
with not unnatural bitterness that we had ourselves
enabled our colonies to do without us, by destroying
for their interest the French power in North America.

Still it was true of the old colonial system in
general that it placed the colony in the position, not
so much of a state in federation, as of a conquered
state. Some theory of the kind is evidently implied
in the language which is commonly used. We speak
of the colonial possessions of England or of Spain.
Now in what sense can one population be spoken of
as the possession of another population ? The ex-
pression almost seems to imply slavery, and at any
rate it is utterly inappropriate, if it merely means
that the one population is subject to the same
Government as the other. At the bottom of it
certainly was the idea that the colony was an estate
which was to be worked for the benefit of the mother-
country.

The relation of Spain to its colonies had become a
type which other states kept before their eyes. A
native population reduced to serfdom, in some parts
driven to compulsory labour by caciques turned into
state-officials, in other parts exterminated by over-
work and then replaced by negroes; an imperious
mother-country drawing from the colony a steady
revenue, and ruling it through an artful mechanism
of division, by which the settlers were held in check
by the priesthood and by a serf-population treated

78 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

paternally that it might be available for that purpose :
such was the tjrpical colonial system. It was wholly
unfit to be a model to such a colony as New England,
which paid no revenue, where there were neither
subject Indians nor mines of gold and silver.
Nevertheless governments could not afford to forget
the precedent of profitable colonies, and I find
Charles II. appealing to it in 1663. It became an
established principle that a colony was a possession.

Now it is essentially barbaric that one community
should be treated as the property of another and the
fruits of its industry confiscated, not in return for
benefits conferred, but by some absolute right whether
of conquest or otherwise. Even where such a
relation rests avowedly upon conquest, it is too
immoral to last long, except in a barbarous state of
manners. Thus for example we may have acquired
India by conquest, but we cannot and do not hold it
for our own pecuniary advantage. We draw no
tribute from it; it is not to us a profitable invest-
ment ; we should be ashamed to acknowledge that in
governing it we in any way sacrificed its interest to
our own. A fortiori then it is barbaric to apply such
a theory to colonies, for it is to treat one's own
countrymen, those with whom we have no concern at
all except on the ground of kindred, as if they were
conquered enemies, or rather in a way in which a
civilised nation cannot treat even conquered enemies.
And probably even in the old colonial system such a
theory was not consciously and deliberately adopted.
But since in the sixteenth century there was no

IV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 79

scruple in applying it to conquered dependencies, and
since the colonies of Spain were in a certain sense
conquered dependencies, we can understand that
unconsciously, unintentionally, the barbaric principle
crept into her colonial system, and that it lurked
there and poisoned it in later times. We can
understand too how the example of Spain and the
precedents set by her influenced the other European
States, Holland, France, and England, which entered
upon the career of colonisation a century later.

In the case of some of these States, for example
France, the result of this theory was that the
mother-country exercised an iron authority over her
colonies. In Canada the French settlers were subject
to a multitude of rigid regulations, from which they
would have been free if they had remained in France.
Nothing of the kind certainly can be said of the
English colonies. They were subject to certain fixed
restrictions in the matter of trade, but apart from
these they were absolutely free. Carrying their
nationality with them, they claimed everywhere the
rights of Englishmen. It has been observed by
Mr. Merivale that the old colonial system admitted
no such thing as the modern Crown Colony, in
which Englishmen are governed administratively
without representative assemblies. In the old
system assemblies were not formally instituted, but
grew up of themselves, because it was the nature of
Englishmen to assemble. Thus the old historian of
the colonies, Hutchinson, writes under the year
1619, "This year a House of Burgesses broke out in

80 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

Virginia." And assuredly the Home Government in
those times did not sin by too much interference.
So completely were the colonies left to themselves,
that some of them, especially those of New England,
were from the very beginning for most practical
purposes independent States. As early as 1665, only
forty years after the first settlement and a hundred
years before the Declaration of Independence, I find
that Massachusetts did not regard itself as practically
subject to England. " They say," writes a Com-
missioner,^ "that so long as they pay the fifth of
all gold and silver, according to the terms of the
Charter, they are not obliged to the King but by
civility."

Thus our old colonial system was not practically
at all tyrannous, and when the breach came the
grievances of which the Americans complained,
though perfectly real, were smaller than ever before
or since led to such mighty consequences. The
misfortune of that system was not that it interfered
too much, but that such interference as it admitted
was of an invidious kind. It claimed very little,
but what it did claim was unjust. It gave un-
bounded liberty except in one department, namely
trade, and in that department it interfered to fine
the colonists for the benefit of the home traders.

1 Calendar of state Papers ; Colonial, December, 1665. He
adds : " They say they can easily spin out seven years by writing,
and before that time a change may come : nay, some have dared to
say, Who knows what the event of this Dutch war may be ? They
furnished Cromwell with many instruments out of their corporation
and college, and solicited him by one Mr. Winsloe to be declared a
Free State, and now style and believe themselves to be so."

IV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 81

Now this was to put the mother-country in a false
position. It put her forward as claiming to treat the
colonies as a possession, as an estate to be worked
for the benefit of those Englishmen who remained at
home. No claim could be more invidious. If it was
not quite the claim that a master makes upon a slave,
it was at least similar to that which an absentee
landlord makes upon tenants in whom he takes no
further interest, and yet even the absentee landlord,
if he gives nothing else, does at least give the use
of land which was really his own. But what — a
Massachusetts colonist might say — has England given
to us that she should have this perpetual mortgage
on our industry 1 The Charter of James I. allowed
us the use of lands which James I. never saw and
which did not belong to him, — lands too which, with-
out any Charter, we might perhaps have occupied for
ourselves without opposition.

Thus this old system was an irrational jumble of
two opposite conceptions. It claimed to rule the
colonists because they were Englishmen and brothers,
and yet it ruled them as if they were conquered
Indians. And again while it treated them as con-
quered people, it gave them so much liberty that
they could easily rebel.

I have shown how this strange hybrid conception
of colonies may have originally sprung up. It is not
very difficult perhaps to understand how the English,
after once adopting, may have retained it, and may
have never seen their way to a better conception.
In the then condition of the world, if the English had
G

82 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

thought of reforming their colonial system, their
most natural course would have been to cast off the
colonies altogether. For the analogy of grown-up
sons and daughters applies very properly to the case
of colonies, when they are so remote from the mother-
country that they have come to have wholly different
interests. All practical union, and therefore all
authority on the part of the mother-country, fall
into abeyance in these circumstances, and the Greek
system is then most appropriate, which gives complete
independence to the colony, but binds it in per-
petual alliance. Now in the seventeenth century our
colonies were, at least in ordinary times, practically
too remote for imion. This is so true that the
difficulty is rather to understand how the secession of
New England can have been delayed so long ; but I
imagine the retarding cause was the growth of the
French Power in North America towards the end
of the seventeenth century. After the great colonial
struggle of France and England had fairly begun,
the colonies were drawn somewhat nearer to us than
before, and we can imagine that if Canada had not
been conquered from the French in 1759, and if the
struggle with France instead of coming to an end
had grown more intense, the colonies would have
issued no Declaration of Independence, and our
connection with them might have been put on a
better footing instead of being dissolved. As it
was, the need of union was at first not felt ; it was
then felt strongly for a time, and then by a sudden
deliverance all pressure was removed, so that the

IV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 83

thought of a reformed colonial system gave way at
once to the dream of independence.

In these circumstances the old colonial system
would naturally be retained as long as possible by
the mother-country, because it was dangerous to
touch it, because the least alteration would snap the
tie that held the colonies altogether. The invidious
rights were doggedly maintained simply because
they existed, and because no alteration for the better
was thought possible.

Probably also no healthier relation could then be
even clearly conceived. I have described colonies
as the natural outlet for superfluous population, the
resource by which those who find themselves crowded
out of the mother-country may live at ease, without
sacrificing what ought to be felt as most valuable,
their nationality. But how could such a view occur
to EngKshmen a century ago? England in those
days was not over -peopled. The whole of Great
Britain had perhaps not more than twelve million
inhabitants at the time of the American War. And
if even then there was more diffused prosperity in
the colonies than at home, on the other hand the love
of native soil, the dominion of habit, the dread and
dislike of migration, were infinitely greater. We are
not to suppose that the steady stream of emigration
to the New World, which we witness, has been
flowing ever since there was a New World, or even
ever since we had prosperous colonics. This move-
ment did not begin till after the peace of 1815.
Under the old colonial system circumstances were

84 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.

quite diflferent, and may be illustrated by what we
know of the history of the New England colonies.
Of these we learn that from their commencement in
1620 for twenty years, until the meeting of the Long
Parliament, immigration did indeed flow in a steady
stream, but for a quite special reason, viz. because
the Anglican Church was then harsh, and New Eng-
land afforded a refuge for Puritanism and Brownism
or Independency. Accordingly we are told that as
soon as the Long Parliament met this stream ceased
to flow, and that afterwards for a hundred years there
was so little immigration into New England from
Old England that it was believed not to balance the
counter-movement of colonists quitting the colony.^
These were circumstances in which, though there
might be colonies, there could be no Greater Britain.
The material basis of a Greater Britain might indeed
be laid — that is, vast territories might be occupied,
and rival nations might be expelled from them. In
this material sense Greater Britain was created in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the idea
that could shape the material mass was still wanting.
Towards this only one step was taken, namely, in
laying down the principle that colonies did in some

^ "The accessions which New England henceforward {i.e. after
1640) received from abroad were more than counterbalanced by
perpetual emigrations, which in the course of two centuries have
scattered her sons over every part of North America, and indeed of
the globe. The immigrants of the preceding period had not
exceeded twenty-five thousand, a primitive stock, from which has
been derived not less perhaps than a fourth part of the present
population of the United States." — Hildreth, Hist, of U. S.
i. p. 267.

IV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 85

way belong together with the mother-country, that
England did in some sense go with them across the
sea, and that they could not cease to be English but
through a war.

And what is true of the English colonies in the
eighteenth centuiy is equally true of the colonies
of other States. Greater Spain, Greater Portugal,
Greater Holland, and Greater France, were all, as
much as Greater Britain, artificial fabrics, wanting
organic unity and life.

Consequently they were all short - lived, and
Greater Britain itself appeared likely to be short-lived.
It seemed indeed likely to be more short-lived than
many of its rivals. The Spanish colonies in America,
which had been founded a hundred years before the
English, did not break ofi" so soon. The Declaration
of Independence of 1776 was not only the most
striking but also the first act of rebellion on the part
of colonies against mother-countries.

Nor did Greater Britain ultimately escape this
danger by any wisdom in its rulers. When the utter
weakness of the old colonial system had been ex-
posed, we did not abandon it and take up a better.
A new Empire gradually grew up out of the same
causes which had called into existence the old, and it
grew up under much the same system. We had not
learnt from experience wisdom, but only despair.
We saw that under that system we could not per-
manently keep our colonies, but, instead of inferring
that the system must be changed, we only inferred
that sooner or later the colonies must be lost.

86 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

Then came, in the forties of this century, the
victory of free-trade. Among other restraints upon
trade it condemned in Mo the old colonial system.
This system was abolished, but at the same time the
opinion grew up that our colonies were useless, and
that the sooner they were emancipated the better.
And this doctrine would have been obviously sound,
if the general conditions of the world had remained
the same in the nineteenth century as they were in
the eighteenth and seventeenth. Our forefathers had
found that they could make no use of colonies except
by extracting trade -advantages from them. What
then could remain to the mother-country, when her
monopoly was resigned ?

There followed a quiet period, in which the very
slender tie which held the Empire together suffered
no strain. In these favourable circumstances the
natural bond was strong enough to prevent a catas-
trophe. Englishmen in all parts of the world still
remembered that they were of one blood and one
religion, that they had one history and one language
and literature. This was enough, so long as neither
colonies nor mother-country were called upon to make
very heavy sacrifices each for the other. Such a
quiet time favours the growth of a wholly different
view of the Empire. This view is founded upon the
consideration that distance has now no longer the
important influence that it had on political relations.

In the last century there could be no Greater
Britain in the true sense of the word, because of the
distance between the mother-country and its colonies

IV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 87

and between the colonies themselves. This impedi-
ment exists no longer. Science has given to the
political organism a new circulation, Avhich is steam,
and a new nervous system, which is electricity.
These new conditions make it necessary to reconsider
the whole colonial problem. They make it in the
first place possible actually to realise the old utopia
of a Greater Britain, and at the same time they
make it almost necessary to do so. First they make
it possible. In the old time such large political
organisms were only stable when they were of low
type. Thus Greater Spain was longer -lived than
Greater Britain, precisely because it was despotically
governed. Greater Britain ran on the rock of
parliamentary liberties, which were then impossible
on so great a scale, while despotism was possible
enough. Had it then been thought possible to give
parliamentary representation to our colonists, the
whole quarrel might easily have been avoided. But
it was not thought possible ; and why 1 Burke gives
you the answer in the well-known passage, in which
he throws ridicule upon the notion of summoning
representatives from so vast a distance. This notion
has now ceased at any rate to be ridiculous, however
great the difficulties of detail may still be. Those
very colonies, which then broke off from us, have
since given the example of a federal organisation, in
which vast territories, some of them thinly peopled
and newly settled, are held easily in union with older
communities, and the whole enjoys in the fullest
degree parliamentary freedom. The United States

88 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

have solved a problem substantially similar to that,
which our old colonial system could not solve, by
showing how a State may throw off a constant stream
of emigration, how from a fringe of settlement on the
Atlantic a whole Continent as far as the Pacific may
be peopled, and yet the doubt never arise whether
those remote settlements will not soon claim their
independence, or whether they will bear to be taxed
for the benefit of the whole.

And lastly what is thus shown to be possible
appears now to be much more urgently important
than in the last century. For the same inventions
which make vast political unions possible, tend to
make states which are on the old scale of magnitude
unsafe, insignificant, second-rate. If the United States
and Russia hold together for another half century,
they will at the end of that time completely dwarf
such old European States as France and Germany,
and depress them into a second class. They will do
the same to England, if at the end of that time
England still thinks of herself as simply a European
State, as the old United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland, such as Pitt left her. It would indeed
be a poor remedy, if we should try to face these vast
states of the new type by an artificial union of settle-
ments and islands scattered over the whole globe,
inhabited by different nationalities, and connected by
no tie except the accident that they happen all alike
to acknowledge the Queen's authority. But I have
pointed out that what we call our Empire is no such
artificial fabric ; that it is not properly, if we exclude

IV THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM 89

India from consideration, an Empire at all ; that it
is a vast English nation, only a nation so widely
dispersed that before the age of steam and electricity
its strong natural bonds of race and religion seemed
practically dissolved by distance. As soon then as
distance is aboHshed by science, as soon as it is proved
by the examples of the United States and Russia
that political union over vast areas has begun to be
possible, so soon Greater Britain starts up, not only
a reality, but a robust reality. It will belong to the
stronger class of political unions. If it will not be
stronger than the United States, we may say with
confidence that it will be far stronger than the great
conglomeration of Slavs, Germans, Turcomans and
Armenians, of Greek Christians, Catholics, Protestants.
Mussulmans and Buddhists, which we call Russia.

LECTUEE V

EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD

In a former lecture I pointed out how much unity is
given to the history of England in the eighteenth
century, how all the great wars of that time are
shown to belong together and fall into a connected
series, if you remark the single fact that Greater
Britain during that period was establishing itself in
opposition to Greater France. And I have since
proceeded further in the same train of reflection, by
remarking that during the eighteenth and seven-
teenth centuries it is not England and France only
that have great colonies, but Spain, Portugal, and
Holland also. You will, I think, find it very helpful
in studying the history of those two centuries,
always to bear in mind that throughout most of that
period the five states of Western Europe all alike are
not properly European states but world-states, and
that they debate continually among themselves a
mighty question, which is not European at all, and
which the student with his eye fixed on Europe is

LECT. V EFFECT OF THE NEW WOULD ON THE OLD 91

too apt to disregard, namely, the question of the
possession of the New World.

This obvious fact, sufficiently borne in mind, gives
much unity to the political history of those nations,
and reduces to a simple formula most of their wars
and alliances. But I now proceed to show, especially
with respect to England, that the European States
were greatly modified, not only in their mutual
dealings with each other, but internally in the nature
of each community, by their connection with the
New World. It will be found that the modern
character of England, as it has come to be since the
Middle Ages, may also be most briefly d'escribed on
the whole by saying that England has been expand-
ing into Greater Britain.

Two great events happened within thirty years of
each other, the discovery of the New World and the
Reformation. These two events closely involved
with two others, viz. the consolidation of the great
European States and the closing of the East by the
Turkish Conquest, caused the vast change which we
know as the close of the Middle Ages and the opening
of the modern period. But of the two leading
events the one was of far more rapid operation than
the other. The Reformation produced its effect at
once and in the very front of the stage of history.
For more than half a century the historical student
finds himself mainly concerned with the struggle
between the Habsburg House and the Reformation,
first in Germany, where it is assisted by France,
then in the Low Countries, where it is helped,

92 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot,

sometimes by France, sometimes by England. Mean-
while the occupation of the New World is going on
in the background, and does not force itself upon the
attention of the student who is contemplating Europe.
The achievements of Cortez and Pizarro do not seem
to have any reaction upon the European struggle.
And perhaps it is not till near the end of the six-
teenth century, when the raids of Francis Drake and
his fellows upon the Spanish settlements in Central
America mainly contributed to decide Spain to her
great enterprise against England, perhaps it is not
till the time of the Spanish Armada, that the New
World begins in any perceptible degree to react
upon the Pld.

But from this time forward European affairs begin
to be controlled by two great causes at once, viz.
the Reformation and the New World, and of these
the Reformation acts with diminishing force, and the
New World has more and more influence. It is
characteristic of the seventeenth century that these
two causes act throughout it in combination. This
is illustrated, as I mentioned above, by Cromwell's
policy of war against Spain, which is double-faced
and, while it seems to be a blow of Protestantism
against Catholicism, is really a stroke for territory in
the New World, so that it results in the conquest of
Jamaica. It is illustrated too by the alliance of
France and England against Holland in 1672, when
one Protestant Power assails another with the pointed
approbation of the Cromwellian statesman Shaftes-
bury, because they have rival interests in the New

V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 93

World. But by the end of that century the Reform-
ation as a force in politics has declined, and in the
eighteenth century the ruling influence is throughout
the New World. This is what gives t6 that century
the prosaic commercial character which distinguishes
it. The religious question with all its grandeur has
sunk to rest, and the colonial question, made up of
worldly and material considerations, has taken its
place.

Now the New World, considered as a boundless
territory open to settlement, would act in two ways
upon the nations of Europe. In the first place it
would have a purely political effect — that is, it would
act upon their Governments. For so much debatable
territory would be a standing cause of war. It is
this action of the New World that we have been
considering hitherto, while we have observed how
mainly the wars of the eighteenth century, and
particularly the great wars of England and France,
were kindled by this cause. But the New World
would also act upon the Eiu-opean communities
themselves, modifying their occupations and ways of
life, altering their industrial and economical char-
acter. Thus the expansion of England involves its
transformation.

England is now pre-eminently a maritime, colonising
and industrial country. It seems to be the prevalent
opinion that England always was so, and from the
nature of her people can never be otherwise. In
Riickert's poem the deity that visited the same spot
of earth at intervals of five hundred years, and found

94 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leOt.

there now a forest, now a city, now a sea, when-
ever he asked after the origin of what he saw,
received for answer, "It has always been so, and
always will be." This unhistorical way of thinking,
this disposition to ascribe an inherent necessity to
whatever we are accustomed to, betrays itself in
much that is said about the genius of the Anglo-
Saxon race. That we might have been other than
we are, nay, that we once were other, is to us so
inconceivable that we try to explain why we were
always the same, before ascertaining by any inquiry
whether the fact is so. It seems to us clear that
we are the great wandering, working, colonising
race, descended from sea-rovers and Vikings. The
sea, we think, is ours by nature's decree, and on
this highway we travel to subdue the earth and to
people it.

And yet in fact it was only in the Elizabethan age
that England began to discover her vocation to trade
and to the dominion of the sea.

Our insular position, and the fact that our island
towards the West and North looks right out upon
the Atlantic Ocean, may lead us to fancy that the
nation must always have been maritime by the
necessity of the case. We entered the island in
ships, and afterwards we were conquered by a nation
of sea-rovers. But after all England is not a Norway ;
it is not a country which has only narrow strips of
cultivable land, and therefore forces its population
to look to the sea for their subsistence. England in
the time of the Plantagenets was no mistress of the

V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 95

seas ; in fact she was scarcely a maritime state at all.
Occasionally in war-time we find medieval England
in possession of a considerable navy. But as soon as
peace arrives the navy dwindles away again. The
constant complaints of piracy in the Channel show
how little control England was able to exercise even
over her own seas. It has been justly remarked
that, as the Middle Ages know of no standing army,
so, excepting the case of some Italian city-states,
they know of no standing fleet. Over and over
again in those times this decay of the navy recurs.
Then when a new war broke out, the Government
would issue a general license to all merchant-ships to
act as privateers, and the merchant-ships would
respond to it by becoming not merely privateers but
pirates. In fact, though under the Plantagenets the
English nation Avas more warlike in spirit than it has
been since, yet it is observable that in those days its
ambition was directed much more to fighting by land
than by sea. The glories of the English army of
those days greatly eclipse those of the English navy ;
we remember the victories of Crecy and Poitiers,
but we have forgotten that of Sluys.

The truth is that the maritime greatness of
England is of much more modern growth than most
of us imagine. It dates from the civil wars of the
seventeenth century and from the career of Eobert
Blake. Blake's pursuit of Prince Rupert through the
Straits of Gibraltar up the eastern coast of Spain is
said to have been the first appearance of an English
fleet in the Mediterranean after the time of the

96 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect

Crusades, There are no doubt naval heroes older
than Blake. There is Francis Drake, and Richard
Grenville, and John Hawkins. But the navy of
Elizabeth was only the English navy in infancy, and
the heroes themselves are not far removed from
buccaneers. Before the Tudor period we find only
the embryo of a navy. In the fifteenth century
English naval history, except during the short reign
of Henry V., shows only feebleness ; before that too
feebleness is the rule and efficiency the exception,
until we arrive at the reign of Edward I., who was
the first to conceive even the idea of a standing
navy.

And not in maritime war only but in maritime
discovery, in maritime activity of all kinds, the great-
ness of England is modern. In the great unrivalled
explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
we did no doubt something, but we had no pretension
whatever to take the lead. It is true that we made
a promising commence;ment. A ship from Bristol
was absolutely the first to touch the American
Continent, so that there were English sailors who
saw America proper a year or so before Columbus
himself. At that moment we seemed likely to rival
Spain, for if the commander Cabot ^ was no English-
man, neither was Columbus a Spaniard. But we fell
behind again ; Henry VII. was unwisely parsimonious,

^ John Cabot was an Italian, by citizenship a "Venetian ; but if
his son Sebastian was born after the father settled in Bristol, and
if the son, not the father, commanded the ship, the whole achieve-
ment might be made out to be English. The evidence however
points the other way. See the discussion in Hellwald, Sebastian
Cabot.

V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 97

Henry VIII. was caught in the vortex of the
Eeformation. In the first generation of great
discoverers there is no English name. Frobisher,
Chancellor and Francis Drake did not appear on
the Ocean till Columbus had lain for half a
century in his grave. Among nations of maritime
renown whether in war, discovery or colonisation,
before the time of the Spanish Armada England
could not pretend to take any high rank. Spain
had carried off the prize, less by merit than by
the good fortune which sent her Columbus, but the
nation which had really deserved it was beyond dis-
pute Portugal, which indeed had almost reason to
complain of the glorious intrusion of Columbus.
Even against him she might urge that, if the object
was to find the Indies, she took the right way and
found them, while he took the wrong way and
missed them.^ After these nations, and in quite a
lower class, might be placed England and France, and
I do not know that England would have a right to
stand before France. This is somewhat disguised in
our histories owing to the natural desire of the
historians to make the most of our actual achieve-
ments. In later times, after our maritime supremacy
had once begun, we should be surprised at any nation
competing with us for the first place, whereas we are
content to appear as spirited aspirants venturing to

1 Even if it were answered in hia behalf that it is better to be
wrong and find America than to be right and find India, Portugal
might answer that she did both, since in the second voyage made
from Lisbon to India she discovered Brazil, only eight years after
the first voy^e of Columbus, and would undoubtedly have
discovered it, if Columbus had never been bom.
U

98 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

contest the pre-eminence of Spain after she has
enjoyed it for the best part of a century. And even
at the end of the sixteenth century, when a large
part of the American Continent has been carved out
in Spanish vice-royalties, and Portugal has sent out
governors to rule in the Indian Ocean, when Spanish
missionaries have visited Japan, when the great poet
of Portugal has led a literary career for sixteen years
and written an epic poem in regions which to former
poets had seemed fabulous, even as late as this the
English are quite beginners in the maritime career,
and have as yet no settlements.

But from naval affairs let us turn to manufactures
and commerce. Here again we shall find that it is
not a natural vocation, founded upon inherent
aptitudes, that has given us our success in these
pursuits. In manufactures our success depends
upon our peculiar relation to the great producing
countries of the globe. The vast harvests of the
world are reaped in countries where land is wide and
population generally thin. But those countries
cannot manufacture their own raw materials, because
all hands are engaged in producing and there is no
surplus population to be employed in manufacture.
The cotton of America and wool of Australia therefore
come to England, where not only such a surplus
population exists, but where also the great standing
instrument of manufacture, coal, is found in abund-
ance and near the coast. Now all this is modern,
most of it very modern. The reign of coal began
with machinery, that is, in the latter half of the

V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 99

eighteenth century. The vast tracts of production
were not heard of till the New World had been laid
open, and could not be used freely till two centuries
and a half later, when railways were introduced.
Evidently therefore the basis of our manufacturing
greatness could not be laid till very recent times.
The England of the Plantagenets occupied a wholly
different economical position. Manufactures were
not indeed wanting, but the nation was as yet so far
from being remarked for its restless industry and
practical talent, that a description written in the
fifteenth century says that the English, "being
seldom fatigued with hard labour, lead a life more
spiritual and refined." ^ In the main England at that
time subsisted upon its lucrative intercourse (magnus
intercursus) with Flanders. She produced the wool
which was manufactured there ; she was to Flanders
what Australia is now to the West Riding. London
was as Sydney, Ghent and Bruges were as Leeds and
Bradford.

This continued in the main to be the case till the
Elizabethan age. But then, about the time that the
maritime greatness of England was beginning, she
began also to be a great manufacturing country. For
the manufactures of Flanders perished in the great
catastrophe of the religious war of the Low Countries
with Spain. Flemish manufacturers swarmed over

1 Fortescue, quoted by Mr. Cunningham, Growth of English
Industry and Commerce, p. 217. Besides being indolent and
contemplative, the Englishman of the fifteenth century y/as pre-
eminent in urbanity and totally devoid of domestic aflfection ! See
Gairdner's Paston Letters, vol. iii. Intr. p. Ixiii.

100 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

into England, and gave a new life to the industry
which had long had its centre at Norwich. There
began what may be called the Norwich period of our
manufacturing history, which lasted through the
whole seventeenth century. The peculiarity of it
was that in this period England manufactured her
own product, wool. Instead of being mainly a pro-
ducing country as before, or mainly a manufacturing
country as now, she was a country manufacturing
what she herself produced.

So much for manufactures. But the present in-
dustrial greatness of England is composed only in
part of her greatness in manufacture. She has also
the carrying trade of the world, and is therefore its
exchange and business - centre. Now this carrying
trade has come to her as the great maritime country ;
it is therefore superfluous to remark that she had it
not in the Middle Ages, when she had not yet
become a maritime country. Indeed in those times a
carrying trade can hardly be spoken of. It implies
a great sea-traffic, and a great sea-traffic did not begin
till the New World was thrown open. Before that
event business had its centre in the central countries
of Europe, in Italy and the Imperial Cities of
Germany. The great business men of the fifteenth
century were the Medici of Florence, the Fuggers of
Augsburg, the founders of the Bank of St. George at
Genoa.

In the Middle Ages England was, from the point
of view of business, not an advanced, but on the
whole a backward country. She must have been

V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 101

despised in the chief commercial countries; as now
she herself looks upon the business-system and the
banking of countries like Germany and even France
as old-fashioned compared to her own, so in the
Middle Ages the Italians must have looked upon
England. With their city-life, wide business-con-
nections and acuteness in affairs, they must have
classed England, along with France, among the old-
world, agricultural, and feudal countries, which lay
outside the main-current of the ideas of the time.

Nor when the great change took place, which left
Italy and Germany in their turn stranded, and turned
the whole course of business into another channel,
are we to suppose that England stepped at once into
their place. Their successor was Holland. Through
a great part of the seventeenth century the carrying
trade of the world was in the hands of the Dutch,
and Amsterdam was the exchange of the world. It
is against this Dutch monopoly that England struggles
in Cromwell's time and in the earlier part of the
reign of Charles II. Not till late in that century
does Holland begin to show signs of defeat. Not
till then does England decidedly take the lead in
commerce.

And thus, if we put together all the items, we
arrive at the conclusion that the England we know,
the supreme maritime commercial and industrial
Power, is quite of modern growth, that it did not
clearly exhibit its principal features till the eighteenth
century, and that the seventeenth century is the
period when it was gradually assuming this form.

102 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

If we ask when it began to do so, the answer is
particularly easy and distinct. It was in the Elizar
bethan Age.

Now this was the time when the New World
began to exert its influence, and thus the most
obvious facts suggest that England owes its modern
character and its peculiar greatness from the outset
to the New World. It is not the blood of the Vikings
that makes us rulers of the sea, nor the industrial
genius of the Anglo-Saxon that makes us great in
manufactures and commerce, but a much more special
circumstance, which did not arise till for many
centuries we had been agricultural or pastoral, war-
like, and indifferent to the sea.

In the school of Carl Ritter much has been said ^
of three stages of civilisation determined by geograph-
ical conditions, the potamic, which clings to rivers, the
thalassic, which grows up around inland seas, and
lastly the oceanic. This theory looks as if it had been
suggested by the change which followed the discovery
of the New World, when indeed European civilisation
passed from the thalassic to the oceanic stage. Till
then trade had clung to the Mediterranean Sea. Till
then the Ocean had been a limit, a boundary, not a
pathway. There had been indeed a certain amount
of intercourse across the narrow seas of the North,
which had nourished the trade of the Hanseatic
League. But in the main the Mediterranean con-
tinued to be the headquarters of industry as of
civilisation, and the Middle Age moved so far in the
* See Peschel, Abhandlungen zur Erd-und Volkerkunde, p. 398.

V EFFECT OF THE NEW WOULD ON THE OLD 103

groove of the ancient world that Italy in both seemed
to have a natural superiority over the countries on
this side of the Alps. France and England had no
doubt advanced greatly, but to the Italian in the
fifteenth century they still seemed comparatively
barbarous, intellectually provincial and second-rate.
The reason of this was that for practical purposes
they were inland, while Italy reaped the benefit of
the civilising sea. The greatness of Florence rested
upon woollen manufactures, that of Venice, Pisa and
Genoa upon foreign trade and dependencies, and all
this at a time when France and England comparatively
were given up to feudalism and rusticity. By the
side of the Italian republics, France and England
showed like Thessaly and Macedonia in comparison
with Athens and Corinth.

Now Columbus and the Portuguese altered all this
by substituting the Atlantic Ocean for the Mediter-
ranean Sea as the highway of commerce. From
that moment the reign of Italy is over. The relation
of cause and effect is here in some degree concealed
by the misfortunes which happened to Italy at the
same time. The political fall of Italy happened
accidentally just at the same moment. The foreigner
crossed the Alps; Italy became a battlefield in the
great struggle of France and Spain ; she was con-
quered, partitioned, enslaved ; and her glory never
revived afterwards. Such a catastrophe and its
obvious cause, foreign invasion, blinds us to all minor
influences, which might have been working to produce
the same eff"ect at the same time. But assuredly, had

104 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.

no foreign invasion taken place, Italy would just then
have entered on a period of decline. The hidden
source which fed her energy and glory was dried up
by the discovery of the New World. She might be
compared to one of those seaports on the coast of
Kent from which the sea has receded. Where there
had once been life and movement, silence and vacancy
must have set in throughout the great city republics
of Italy, even if no stranger had crossed the Alps.
The Mediterranean Sea had not indeed receded, but
it had lost once for all the character which it had
had almost from the days of the Odyssey. It had
ceased to be the central sea of human intercourse and
civilisation, the chief, nay, almost the one sea of
history. It so happened that, soon after commerce
began to cover the Atlantic, it was swept out of the
Mediterranean by the besom of the Turkish sea-power.
Thus Eanke remarks that the trade of Barcelona
seemed to be little affected by the new discoveries,
but that it sank rapidly from about 1529, in conse-
quence of the maritime predominance of the Turks
caused by the successes of Barbarossa, the league of
France with Solyman, and the foundation of the
Barbary States. So clearly had the providential
edict gone forth that European civilisation should
cease to be thalassic and should become oceanic.

The great result was that the centre of movement
and intelligence began to pass from the centre of
Europe to its Western Coast. Civilisation moves
away from Italy and Germany ; where it will settle
is not yet clear, but certainly farther west. See how

V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 105

strikingly this change stands out from the history
of the sixteenth century. At the beginning of that
century all the genius in the world seems to live in
Italy or Germany. The golden age of modern art is
passing in the first country, but if there are any rivals
to the Italian painters they are German, and Michael
Angelo is obliged at least to reason with those who
prefer the maniera tedesca. Meanwhile the Reforma-
tion belongs to Germany. For France and England
in those days it seems sufiicient glory to have given a
welcome to the Renaissance and to the Reformation.
But gradually in the latter part of the sixteenth
century we become aware that civilisation is shifting
its headquarters. Italy and Germany are first
rivalled and then eclipsed ; gradually we grow accus-
tomed to the thought that great things are rather to
be looked for in other countries. In the seven-
teenth century almost all genius and greatness is
to be found in the western or maritime states of
Europe.

Now these are the states which were engaged in
the struggle for the New World. Spain, Portugal,
France, Holland and England have the same sort of
position with respect to the Atlantic Ocean that
Greece and Italy had in antiquity with respect to the
Mediterranean. And they begin to show a similar
superiority in intelligence. Vast problems of conquest,
colonisation and commerce occupy their minds, which
before had vegetated in a rustic monotony. I have
already shown you at length what an efTect this
change had upon the English nation. The cfi"ect

106 EXPANSION OP ENGLAND lect.

produced upon the Dutch was quite as striking and
much more rapid. The Golden Age of Holland is
the first half of the seventeenth century. Let us
examine for a moment the causes which produced its
prosperity.

The Low Countries which revolted against Philip
II. of Spain were, as you know, not merely the seven
provinces which afterwards made the Dutch Eepublic
and now make the Dutch Monarchy, but those other
provinces which now make the kingdom of Belgium.
It was the latter group which at the time of the
rebellion were most prosperous. They were the
great manufacturing region, the Lancashire or West
Eiding of the Middle Ages. The former group, the
Dutch provinces, were then of much less importance.
They were maritime and chiefly occupied in the
herring fishery. Now the result of the Eebellion
was that Spain was able to retain possession of the
Belgian group, which from this time is known as the
Spanish Low Countries, but she was not able to hold
the Dutch group, which, after a war which seemed
interminable, she was forced to leave to their inde-
pendence. Now during the struggle the prosperity
of the Belgian Provinces, as I have pointed out, was
ruined. The Flemish manufacturers emigrated and
founded the woollen manufacture of England. But
the maritime provinces, poorer at the outset, instead
of being ruined grew rich during the war, and had
become, before it was ended, the wonder and the
great commercial state of the world. How was this t
It was because they were maritime, and because their

V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLL 107

sea was the highway which led to the New World.
As they had devoted themselves earlier to the sea,
they had the start of the English, and their war with
the Spaniards proved actually an advantage to them,
because it threw open to their attack all the thinly-
peopled ill-defended American Empire of Spain. The
world was astonished to see a petty state with a
barren soil and insignificant population, not only hold
its own against the great Spanish Empire, but in the
midst of this unequal contest found a great colonial
Empire for itself in both hemispheres. Meanwhile
the intellectual stimulus, which the sea had begun
to give to these "Western States, was nowhere more
manifest than in Holland. This same small popula-
tion took the lead in scholarship as in commerce,
welcomed Lipsius, Scaliger and Descartes, and pro-
duced Grotius at the same time as Piet Hein and Van
Tromp.

This is the most startling single instance of the
action of the New World. The efi"ects produced in
Holland were nothing like so momentous as those
which I have traced in England, for the greatness of
Holland, wanting a basis sufficiently broad, was short-
lived, but they were more sudden and more evidently
referable to this single cause.

Such then was the effect of the New World on
the Old. It is visible not merely in the wars and
alliances of the time, but also in the economic growth
and transformation of the Western States of Europe.
Civilisation has often been powerfully promoted by
some great enterprise in which several generations

108 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

continuously take part. Such was the war of Europe
and Asia to the ancient Greeks; such the Crusades
in the Middle Ages. Such then for the Western
States of Europe in recent centuries has been the
struggle for the New World. It is this more than
anything else which has placed these nations, where
they never were before, in the van of intellectual pro-
gress, and especially it is by her success in this field
that our own country has acquired her peculiar
greatness.

I will conclude this lecture with some remarks on
the large causes which, in the struggle of five states,
left the final victory in the hands of England.
Among these five we have seen that Spain and
Portugal had the start by a whole century, and that
Holland was in the field before England. Afterwards
for about a century France and England contended
for the New World on tolerably equal terms. Yet
now of all these states England alone remains in
possession of a great and commanding colonial power.
Why is this?

We may observe that Holland and Portugal
laboured under the disadvantage of too small a basis.
The decline of Holland had obvious causes, which
have often been pointed out. For her suflferiugs in a
war of eighty years with Spain she found the com-
pensations I have just described. But when this
was followed, first by naval wars with England, and
then by a struggle with France which lasted half a
century, and she had now England for a rival on
the seas, she succumbed. At the beginning of the

V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 109

eighteenth century she shows symptoms of decay, and
at the Treaty of Utrecht she lays down her arms,
victorious indeed, but fatally disabled.

The Portuguese met with a diflFerent misfortune.
From the outset they had recognised the insufficiency
of their resources, regretting that they had not been
content with a less ambitious course of acquisition on
the northern coast of Africa. In 1580 they suffered
a blow such as has not fallen on any other of the
still existing European states. Portugal with all her
world-wide dependencies and commercial stations fell
under the yoke of Spain, and underwent a sixty
years' captivity. In this period her colonial Empire,
which by becoming Spanish was laid open to the
attacks of the Dutch, suffered greatly ; Portuguese
writers accuse Spain of having witnessed their losses
with pleasure, and of having made a scapegoat of
Portugal ; certain it is that the discontent which led
to the insurrection of 1640, and founded a new
Portugal under the House of Bragan^a, was mainly
caused by these colonial losses. Yet the insurrection
itself cost her something more in foreign possessions ;
she paid the Island of Bombay for the help of
England. Nor could the second Portugal ever rival
the first, that nurse of Prince Henry, Bartholomew
Diaz, Vasco da Gama, Magelhaens and Camoens,
which has quite a peculiar glory in the history of
Europe.

Be it remarked in passing that this passage also of
the history of the seventeenth century shows us the
New World reacting on the Old. As the rise of

110 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

Holland, the great occurrence of its first years, so the
Revolution of Portugal, which occupies the middle of
it, is caused by the influence of the colonies.

As to the ill-success of Spain and France, it would
no doubt be idle to suppose that any one cause will
fully explain it. But perhaps one large cause may be
named which in both cases contributed most to pro-
duce the result.

Spain lost her colonial Empire only, as it were, the
other day. Having founded it a century earlier, she
retained it nearly half a century later than England
retained her first Empire. Compared to England,
she has been inferior only in not having continued to
found new colonies. And this was the effect of that
strange decay of vitality which overtook Spain in the
latter half of the sixteenth century. The decline of
population and the ruin of finance dried up in her
every power, that of colonisation included.

No similar decline is observable in France. France
lost her colonies in a series of unsuccessful wars, and
perhaps you may think that it is not necessary to
inquire further, and that the fortune of war explains
everything. But I think I discern that both States
were guilty of the same error of policy, which in the
end mainly contributed to their failure. It may be
said of both that they " had too many irons in the
fire."

There was this fundamental difi'erence between
Spain and France on the one side and England on
the other, that Spain and France were deeply involved
in the struggles of Europe, from which England has

V EFFECT OF THE NEW WOKLD ON THE OLD 111

always been able to hold herself aloof. In fact, as an
island, England is distinctly nearer for practical pur-
poses to the New World, and almost belongs to it, or
at least has the choice of belonging at her pleasure to
the New World or to the Old. Spain might perhaps
have had the same choice, but for her conquests in
Italy and for the fatal marriage which, as it were,
wedded her to Germany. In that same sixteenth
century in which she was colonising the New World,
Spain was merged at home in the complex Spanish
Empire, which was doomed beforehand to decline,
because it could never raise a revenue proportioned
to its responsibilities. It was almost bankrupt when
Charles V. abdicated, though it could then draw upon
the splendid prosperity of the Netherlands ; when,
soon after, it alienated this province, lost the poorer
half of it and ruined the richer, when it engaged in
chronic war with France, when after eighty years of
war with the Dutch it entered upon a quarter of a
century of war with Portugal, it could not but sink,
as it did, into bankruptcy and political decrepitude.
These overwhelming burdens, coupled with a want of
industrial aptitude in the Spanish people, whose
temperament had been formed in a permanent war
of religion, produced the result that the nation to
which a new world had been given could never
rightly use or profit by the gift.

As to France, it is still more manifest that she lost
the New World because she was always divided
between a policy of colonial extension and a policy of
European conquest. If we compare together those

112 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

seven great wars between 1688 and 1815, we shall
be struck with the fact that most of them are double
wars, that they have one aspect as between England
and France and another as between France and
Germany. It is the double policy of France that
causes this, and it is France that suffers by it.
England has for the most part a single object and
wages a single war, but France wages two wars at
once for two distinct objects. When Chatham said
he would conquer America in Germany, he indicated
that he saw the mistake which France committed by
dividing her forces, and that he saw how, by subsidis-
ing Frederick, to make France exhaust herself in
Germany, while her possessions in America passed
defenceless into our hands. Napoleon in like manner
is distracted between the New World and the Old.
He would humble England; he would repair the
colonial and Indian losses of his country. But he
finds himself conquering Germany and at last invad-
ing Eussia. His comfort is that through Germany he
can strike at English trade, and through Russia
perhaps make his way to India.

England has not been thus distracted between two
objects. Connected but slightly with the European
system since she evacuated France in the fifteenth
century, she has not since then lived in chronic war
with her neighbours. She has not hankered after
the Imperial Crown or guaranteed the Treaty of
Westphalia, When Napoleon by his Continental
System shut her out from Europe, she showed that
she could do without Europe, Hence her hands have

V EFFECT OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OLD 113

always been free, while trade of itself inevitably
drew her thoughts in the direction of the New World.
In the long rim this advantage has been decisive.
She has not had to maintain a European Ascendency,
as Spain and France have had ; on the other hand
she has not had to withstand such an Ascendency
by mortal conflict within her own territory, as
Holland and Portugal, and Spain also, have been
forced to do. Hence nothing has interrupted her or
interfered with her, to draw her off from the quiet
progress of her colonial settlements. In one word,
out of the five states which competed for the New
World success has fallen to that one — not which
showed at the outset the strongest vocation for
colonisation, not which surpassed the others in daring
or invention or energy — but to that one which waa
least hampered by the Old World.

LECTURE VI

COMMERCE AND WAR

]

Competition for the New World between the five
western maritime States of Europe : this is a formula
which sums up a great part of the history of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is one of
those generalisations which escape us so long as we
study history only in single states.

Much would be gained if the student of history
would look at modern Europe as he has already the
habit of looking at ancient Greece. Here he has
constantly before him three or four different states at
once — Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Argos, not to mention
Macedonia and Persia, and is led to make most
instructive comparisons and most useful reflections
upon large general tendencies. This is entirely
owing to the accident that Greece was not a State
but a complex of States, which fact our historians do
not perceive clearly enough to conclude, as in con-
sistency they ought, that they ought not to write a
history of Greece at all, but separate histories of

LECT. yi COMMERCE AND WAR 115

Athens, Sparta, etc. Let me ask those of you who
know Grecian history to apply to these Western
States the mode of conceiving to which you have
accustomed yourselves. You have been in the habit
of thinking of a cluster of States gathered round a
common sea, which is studded with islands, and
which has on the other side of it large territories
imperfectly known and inhabited by strange races.
You have thought of all these States together, and
not merely of each by itself ; you have traced the
general results produced upon the Hellenic world as
a whole by all the intricate play of interests between
the several Hellenic city-states. Now the five States
we have in view — Spain, Portugal, France, Holland
and England — were ranged in like manner on the
North-Eastern shore of the Atlantic Ocean, and had
in like manner a common interest in what that
Ocean contained or hid. If the States seem to you
so large, the Ocean so boundless, and the settlements
so scattered that you cannot bring them into one
view, make an effort, bring them into the same map,
and draw the map on a small scale. But your great
effort must be to raise your head above the current
of mere chronological narrative, to apply a fixed
principle to the selection of facts, grouping them not
by nearness in time, nor by their personal biographical
connection, but by the internal affinity of causation.
This great struggle of five States for the New World
differs from the struggles of those old Greek States
in thisj that it is not isolated. It was superinduced
by the discovery of Columbus upon other struggles,

116 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

themselves sufficiently complicated, which were going
on within the European States; in particular it is
entangled with the great religious struggle of the
Eef ormation. Altogether what a tangled web ! Now
in a case like this what shall science do 1 Surely the
first thing will be to separate and arrange together all
the effects whioh can be traced to any one cause. In
order to do this it must evidently neglect chrono-
logical order ; it must break the fetters of narrative.
Following this method, it will see in the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as I have
pointed out, two grand causes, each followed by its
multitude of effects, viz. the Reformation and the
attraction of the New World; these two grand
causes it will study separately, tracing each through
the long series of effects produced by it, and then
perhaps, but not till then, it will consider the mutual
action of the two causes upon each other. It is our
business at present to consider separately the effects
produced on the five Western States by the attraction
of the New World.

Now why should the New World have produced
any further eflfect upon those States than simply to
rouse them to a new commercial activity, and perhaps
more gradually to enlarge their ideas by enlarging
their knowledge 1 That it did produce this latter
effect I explained in the last lecture by pointing out
how in the course of the sixteenth century the centre
of civilisation moves from the Mediterranean to the
neighbourhood of the Atlantic, so that, whereas in
the earlier years of it the eye turns always to Italy or

VI COMMERCE AND WAR 117

Germany, where tke Kaphaels and Michael Angelos,
the Ariostos and Macchiavelli's, the Diirers and
Hiittens and Luthers Hve, at the end of it and in the
seventeenth century the eye turns just as naturally
Westward and Northward. We see Cervantes and
Calderon in Spain, Shakspeare and Spenser and
Bacon in England ; Scaliger and Lipsius, then Grotius
arise in Holland, Montaigne and Casaubon in France ;
the destinies of the world are in the hands of Henry
IV., Queen Elizabeth, the Prince of Orange ; and, as
time goes on, we grow more and more accustomed to
expect everything great in this quarter, and to regard
Italy and the Mediterranean as out of date. So much
was natural. The contact of the New World might
have been expected to produce this effect, for, as we
have always been accustomed to trace ancient civilisa-
tion to the influence of the Mediterranean, we are
prepared to find that the Atlantic, when once it
becomes a Mediterranean, — that is, when once lands
are laid open on the farther side of it, — should pro-
duce similar effects on a grander scale. But it does
not at once appear why any further effects should be
produced. To understand this we must consider the
peculiar nature of the contact between the New
World and the Old, and, now that we have looked a
little into modern colonisation, we are in a condition
to do so.

Let us think how the New World might have
acted on the Old quite otherwise than as it did.
What if America had been found to be full of power-
ful and consolidated States like those of Europe?

118 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.

Then our relations with it would have been similar to
our present relations with China or Japan. Our
advances might have been met with a certain prudery,
as by China; in that case the result would either
have been non-intercourse, or some attempt, success-
ful or otherwise, to force intercourse upon them. Or
the American States might have proved open-minded
and liberal like the Japanese ; then there might have
followed intercourse, exchange of ideas, and mutual
benefit. But in either case it does not appear that
important political consequences would have followed,
for in those days, while communication was so difficult,
it is not likely that any fusion of the European
political system with the American system, any
alliances of European with American States, would
have taken place. The two worlds would have
remained aware of each other, yet almost closed to
each other, in a relation less like that we now see
between England and China or Japan than that of
England with the same countries or with India and
Persia during the seventeenth century.

Well ! there were no such consolidated States in
America except in Mexico and Peru, where they were
overwhelmed in a moment by the Spanish advent-
urers. Hence the New "World had not the power it
would otherwise have had of keeping the Old at
arm's length. And the consequence was that there
began between the Old World and the New an
emigration.

Now this by itself is a great fact. It implies that
the Atlantic had become, not merely a Mediterranean,

TI COMMERCE AND WAR 119

but something more. To the Greeks the Mediter-
ranean gave trade, intercourse with foreigners,
movement and change of ideas, but it did not, unless
perhaps at a certain time, aflford a means of unbounded
emigration. Emigration there was, but on a scale
not only inferior, but inferior in proportion. Political
Powers, some of them exclusive, guarded the opposite
shore. But even this fact is rather social than
political. Emigration is in itself only a private
aflfair; it does not, as such, concern Governments,
and though it may produce a great effect upon them,
as for example the Puritan emigration to New
England produced no doubt a perceptible effect in
our civil troubles, yet this effect is only indirect.

Governments might have shut their eyes to all
the affairs of the New World. In that case the great
adventurers would perhaps have set up kingdoms for
themselves, and the reaction of the New World upon
the Old would have been confined within narrow limits.
The Continent of America was so roomy, so thinly
peopled, that the action of such adventurers, what-
ever it might have been, would have had no remote
consequences, and the Governments of Europe might
have looked on without anxiety. The New World
would then have exerted as little influence upon the
Old as, for example, the South American States now
exert upon Europe. Eevolutionary violence may
rage there, but it rages unheeded, and its effects
evaporate in the boundless toi ritory peopled by so few
inhabitants.

By considering thus what might have been we are

120 EXPANSION Of ENGLAND lect.

brought to discern the critical point in the course
which was actually pursued. The New World could
not but exert a strong influence, but it need not have
exerted, directly at least, any properly political
influence upon the Old. It was made into a political
force of the most tremendous magnitude by the
interference of the European Governments, by their
assuming the control of all the States set up by their
subjects in it. The necessary efi'ect of this policy
was to transform entirely the politics of Europe, by
materially altering the interest and position of five
great European States. I bring this fact into strong
relief because I think it has been too much over-
looked, and it is the fundamental fact upon which
this course of lectures is founded. In one word,
the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries does not lie outside Europe, but exists
inside it as a principle of unlimited political change.
Instead of being an isolated region in which history
is not yet interested, it is a present influence of the
utmost importance to Avhich the historian must be
continually alive — an influence which for a long time
rivalled the Reformation, and from the beginning of
the eighteenth century surpassed the Reformation,
in its eff"ect upon the politics of the European States.
Historians of those centuries have kept in view
mainly two or perhaps three great movements —
first, the Reformation and its consequences ; secondly,
the constitutional movement in each country leading
to liberty in England and to revolution through
despotism in France. They have also considered tlie

VI COMMERCE AND WAR 121

great Ascendencies which from time to time have
arisen in Europe, that of the House of Austria, that of
the House of Bourbon, and again that of Napoleon.
> These great movements have been, as it were, the
framework in which they have fitted all particular
incidents. The framework is insuflficient and too
exclusively European. It furnishes no place for a
multitude of most important occurrences, and the
movement which it overlooks is perhaps greater and
certainly more continuous and durable than any of
those which it recognises. Each view of Europe
separately is true. Europe is a great Church and
Empire breaking up into distinct kingdoms and
national or voluntary Churches, as those say who fix
their eyes on the Reformation ; it is a group of
monarchies in which popular freedom has been
gradually developing itself, as the constitutional
lawyer says ; it is a group of states which balance
themselves uneasily against each other, liable there-
fore to be thrown ofi" its equilibrium by the pre-
ponderance of one of them, as the international
lawyer says. But all these accounts are incomplete
and leave almost half the facts unexplained. We
must add, " It is a group of States, of which the five
westernmost have been acted upon by a steadfast
gravitation towards the New World, and have
dragged in their train great New World Empires."

I have already applied this observation to the
eighteenth century, and shown you how it explains
the perpetual struggles which that century witnessed
between England and France. These struggles, I am

122 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

persuaded, are treated by historians of the Balance of
Power from a point of view much too exclusively
European, This strikes me particularly in the
picture they give of the career of Napoleon, They
see in him simply a ruler who had the ambition to
undertake the conquest of all Europe, and who had
the genius almost to succeed in this enterprise.
Now the main peculiarity of his career is that, though
he did this, he did not intend it, but something
different. He intended to make great conquests,
and he made great conquests, but the conquests he
made were not those he intended to make. Napoleon
did not care about Europe. " Cette vieille Europe
wHennuie," he said frankly. His ambition was all
directed towards the New World. He is the Titan
whose dream it is to restore that Greater France
which had fallen in the struggles of the eighteenth
century, and to overthrow that Greater Britain
which had been established on its ruins. He makes
no secret of this ambition, nor does he ever renounce
it. His conquests in Europe are made, as it were,
accidentally, and he treats them always as a starting-
point for a new attack on England. He conquers
Germany, but whyl Because Austria and Eussia,
subsidised by England, march against him while he
is brooding at Boulogne over the conquest of England.
When Germany is conquered, what is his first
thought? That now he has a ncAV weapon against
England, since he can impose the Continental System
upon all Europe. Does he occupy Spain and Portu-
gal % It is because they are maritime countries with

VI COMMERCE AND WAR 123

fleets and colonies that may be used against England.
Lastly, when you study such an enterprise as the
Eussian expedition, you are forced to admit, either
that it had no object, or that it was directed against
England. But this view escapes most historians,
because from the outset they have underestimated
the magnitude of that great historical cause, the
attraction of the New World upon the Old, To
them colonies have seemed unimportant, because they
were distant and thinly peopled, as it were, inert,
almost lifeless appendages to the parent-states. And
true it is that the colonies received very little direct
attention in the headquarters of politics. In London
or Paris no doubt few people troubled themselves'
with the affairs of Virginia and Louisiana ; there no
doubt domestic topics absorbed attention, and politics
seemed centred in the last parliamentary division or
the last court intrigue. But the eye is caught by
what is on the surface of things, not by Avhat is at
the bottom of them; and the hidden cause which
made Ministers rise and fall, which convulsed Europe
and led it into war and revolution, was, far more
than might be supposed, the standing rivalry of
interests in the New World.

But if this is so, it ought to be applicable to the
seventeenth century as well as to the eighteenth. In
the history of the relation of the New World to the
Old the three centuries, the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and eighteenth, have each their marked character.
The sixteenth century may be called the Spain-and-
Portugal period. As yet the New World is monopo-

124 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

lised by the two nations which discovered it, by the
country of Vasco da Gama and the adopted country
of Columbus, until late in- the century Spain and
Portugal become one State in the hands of Philip IL
In the seventeenth century the other three States,
France, Holland, and England, enter the colonial
field. The Dutch take the lead. In the course of
their war with Spain they get possession of most of
the Portuguese possessions, which have now become
Spanish, in the East Indies ; they even succeed for a
time in annexing Brazil. France and England soon
after establish their colonies in North America.
From this time then, or almost from this time, we
may expect to trace that transformation in the
politics of Europe, which I showed to be the necessary
consequence of the new position assumed by these
five States. During the course of this century a
certain change takes place in the relative colonial
importance of the five States. Portugal declines ; so
later does Holland. Spain remains in a condition of
immobility ; her vast possessions are not lost, but
additions are no longer made to them, and they
remain secluded, like China itself, from intercourse
with the rest of the world. England and France
have both decidedly advanced ; Colbert has placed
France in the first rank of commercial countries, and
she has explored the Mississippi. But the English
colonies have decidedly the advantage in population.
And thus it is that the eighteenth century witnesses
the great duel of France and England for the New
World.

VI COMMERCE AND WAR 125

I exhibited that great duel early in this course, in
order to show you at once by a conspicuous instance
that the expansion of England has been neither a
tranquil process nor yet belonging purely to the most
recent times : that throughout the eighteenth century
that expansion was an active principle of disturbance,
a cause of wars unparalleled both in magnitude and
number. I could not at that stage go further, but
now that we have analysed the attraction of the New
World upon the Old in general and upon England in
particular, now that we have considered the nature
and intensity of that attraction, we are in a condition
to trace further back and even to its beginning the
expansion of England into Greater Britain.

It was in the Elizabethan age, as I showed, that
England first assumed its modern character, and this
means, as I showed at the same time, that then first
it began to find itself in the main current of commerce,
and then first to direct its energies to the sea and to
the New World. At this point then we mark the
beginning of the expansion, the first sjrmptom of
the rise of Greater Britain. The great event which
announces to the world England's new character and
the new place which she is assuming in the world, is
the naval invasion by the Spanish Armada. Here,
we may say decidedly, begins the modern history of
England. Compare this event with anything that
preceded it in English history ; you will see at once
how new it is. And if you inquire in what precisely
the novelty consists, you Avill arrive at this answer,
that the event is throughout oceanic. Of course we

126 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

had always been an island; of course our foreign
wars had always begun at least on the sea. But by
the sea in earlier times had always been meant the
strait, the channel, or at most the narrow seas. Now
for the first time it is different. The whole struggle
begins, proceeds and ends upon the sea, and it is but
the last act of a drama which has been played, not
in the English seas at all, but in the Atlantic, the
Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico. The invader is the
master of the New World, the inheritor of the
legacies of Columbus and Vasco da Gama ; his main
complaint is that his monopoly of that New World
has been infringed; and by whom is the invasion
met 1 Not by the Hotspurs of medieval chivalry, nor
by the archers who won Cr^cy for us, but by a new
race of men, such as medieval England had not
known, by the hero - buccaneers, the Drakes and
Hawkinses, whose lives had been passed in tossing
upon that Ocean which to their fathers had been an
unexplored, unprofitable desert. Now for the first
time might it be said of England — what the popular
song assumes to have been always true of her — that
" her march is on the Ocean wave."

But there is no Greater Britain as yet ; only the
impulse has been felt to found one, and the path has
been explored, which leads to the transatlantic seats
where the Englishmen of Greater Britain may one
day live. While Drake and Hawkins have set the
example of the rough heroism and love of roaming
which might find the vray into the Promised Land,
Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh display the

VI COMMERCE AND WAR 127

genius which settles, founds and colonises. In the
next reign Greater Britain is founded, though neither
Gilbert nor Raleigh are allowed to enter into it. In
1606 James I. signs the Charter of Virginia, and in
1620 that of New England. And now very speedily
the new life with which England is animated, her
new objects and her new resources, are exhibited so
as to attract the attention of all Europe. It is in the
war of King and Parliament, and afterwards in the
Protectorate, that the new English policy is first ex-
hibited on a great scale. Under Cromwell England
appears, but prematurely and on the unsound basis
of imperialism, such as she definitely became under
William III. and continued to be throughout the
eighteenth century, and this is England steadily ex-
panding into Greater Britain.

It seems to me to be the principal characteristic
of this phase of England that she is at once commer-
cial and warlike. A commonplace is current about
the natural connection between commerce and peace,
and hence it has been inferred that the wars of
modern England are attributable to the influence of
a feudal aristocracy. Aristocracies, it is said, naturally
love war, being in their own origin military ; whereas
the trader just as naturally desires peace, that he
may practise his trade without interruption. A good
specimen of the a priori method of reasoning in
politics ! Why ! how came we to conquer India 1
Was it not a direct consequence of trading with India ?
And that is only the most conspicuous illustration of a
law which prevails throughout English history in the

128 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, — thelaw, namely,
of the intimate interdependence of war and trade, so
that throughout that period trade leads naturally to
war and war fosters trade. I have pointed out
already that the wars of the eighteenth century were
incomparably greater and more burdensome than
those of the Middle Ages. In a less degree those of
the seventeenth century were also great. These are
precisely the centuries in which England grew more
and more a commercial country. England indeed
grew ever more warlike at that time as she grew more
commercial. And it is not difficult to show that a
cause was at work to make war and commerce increase
together. This cause is the old colonial system.

Commerce in itself may favour peace, but when
commerce is artificially shut out by a decree of
Government from some promising territory, then
commerce just as naturally favours war. We know
this by our own recent experience with China. The
New World might have favoured trade without at
the same time favouring war, if it had consisted of a
number of liberal-minded States open to intercourse
with foreigners, or if it had been occupied by Euro-
pean colonies which pursued an equally liberal
system. But we now know what the old colonial
system was. We know that it carved out the New
World into territories, which were regarded as estates,
to be enjoyed in each case by the colonising nation.
The hope of obtaining such splendid estates and
enjoying the profits that Avere reaped from them, con-
stituted the greatest stimulus to commerce that had

n COMMERCE AND WAR 129

ever been known, and it was a stimulus which acted
without intermission for centuries. This vast historic
cause had gradually the effect of bringing to an end
the old medieval structure of society and introducing
the industrial ages. But inseparable from the com-
mercial stimulus was the stimulus of international
rivalry. The object of each nation was now to
increase its trade, not by waiting upon the wants of
mankind, but by a wholly different method, namely
by getting exclusive possession of some rich tract in
the New World. Now whatever may be the natural
opposition between the spirit of trade and the spirit
of war, trade pursued in this method is almost
identical with war, and can hardly fail to lead to war.
What is conquest but appropriation of territory?
Now appropriation of territory under the old colonial
system became the first national object. The five
nations of the West were launched into an eager com-
petition for territory — that is, they were put into a
relation to each other in which the pursuit of wealth
naturally led to quarrels, a relation in which, as I
said, commerce and war were inseparably entangled
together, so that commerce led to war and war
fostered commerce. The character of the new period
which was thus opened showed itself very early.
Consider the nature of that long desultory war of
England with Spain, of which the expedition of the
Armada was the most striking incident. I have said
that the English sea-captains were very like buc-
caneers, and indeed to England the war is throughout
an industry, a way to wealth, the most thriving
K

130 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

business, the most profitable investment, of the time.
That Spanish war is in fact the infancy of English
foreign trade. The first generation of Englishmen
that invested capital, put it into that war. As now
we put our money into railways or what notl so
then the keen man of business took shares in the
new ship which John Oxenham or Francis Drake was
fitting out at Plymouth, and which was intended to
lie in wait for the treasure galleons, or make raids
upon the Spanish towns in the Gulf of Mexico. And
yet the two countries were formally not even at war
with each other. It was thus that the system of
monopoly in the New World made trade and war
indistinguishable from each other. The prosperity
of Holland was the next and a still more startling
illustration of the same law. What more ruinous,
you say, than a long war, especially to a small state 1
And yet Holland made her fortune in the world by
a war of some eighty years with Spain. How was
this 1 It was because war threw open to her attack
the whole boundless possessions of her antagonist in
the New World, which would have been closed to her
in peace. By conquest she made for herself an
Empire, and this Empire made her rich.

These are the new views which begin to determine
English policy under the Protectorate. From the
point from which we here regard English history, the
great occurrence of the seventeenth century before
1688 is not the Civil War or the execution of the
King, but the intervention of Cromwell in the Euro-
pean war. This act may almost be regarded as the

VI COMMEECE AND WAR 131

foundation of the English World-Empire. It was of so
much immediate importance that it may be said to
have decided the fall of the Spanish Power. Spain,
which less than a century before had overshadowed
the world, is found soon after lying a helpless prey
to the ambition of Louis XIV. Perhaps the turning-
point is marked by the Eevolution of Portugal,
which took place in 1640. Then began the fall of
Spain. But for twenty years from that time she
struggled with her destiny, and the internal troubles
of her rival France caused a reaction in her favour.
At this crisis then the interference of Cromwell was
decisive. Spain fell never to rise again, and no
measure taken by England had for centuries been so
momentous.

But it marks the rise as well as the fall of a World-
Power. England by this time has learned to profit
by the example of Holland, and follows her in the
path of commercial empire. The first Stuarts, though
it was in their time that our first colonies were
founded, show, I think, no signs of having entered
into the new ideas. They abandon the Elizabethan
system, and set their faces towards the Old World
rather than the New. But this reaction comes to an
end with the accession to power of the party of the
Commonwealth. A policy now begins which is not,
to be sure, very scrupulous, but is able, resolute, and
successful.

It is oceanic and looks westward, like the policy
of the later years of Elizabeth. Here for the first
time the New World reacts upon the Old by actual

132 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.

personal influence. Dr. Palfrey lias traced in a very
interesting manner what I may call the New England
clement in our Parliamentary party. New England
was itself the child of Puritanism, and of Puritanism
in that second form of Independency to which Crom-
well himself adhered. Accordingly it took a very
direct part in the English Revolution. Several pro-
minent English politicians of that time may be
mentioned who had themselves lived in Massa-
chusetts, e.g. Sir Henry Vane, George Downing, and
Hugh Peters, Cromwell's chaplain. Now too the
great English navy, so famous since, begins to rule
the seas under the command of Robert Blake. The
navy is now and henceforth the great instrument of
England's power. The army — though it is more highly
organised than ever before, and has in fact usurped
the government of the country and placed its leader
on the throne, — this army falls with a great catas-
trophe and is devoted to public execration, but the
navy from this time forward is the nation's favourite.
Henceforward it is a maxim that England is not a
military state, that she ought to have either no army
or the smallest army possible, but that her navy
ought to be the strongest in the world.

From our point of view the colonial policy of
Cromwell does not attract us by any marked super-
iority either in morality or success to that of the
Restoration, but rather as the model which Charles
n. imitates. Moral rectitude is hardly a character-
istic of it, and if it is religious, this perhaps would
have appeared, had the Protectorate lasted longer, to

VI COMMERCE AND WAR 133

have been its most dangerous feature. Nothing is
more dangerous than Imperialism marching with an
idea on its banner, and Protestantism was to our
Emperor Oliver what the ideas of the Eevolution
were to Napoleon and his nephew. The success too
of this policy is of the same Napoleonic type. Eng-
land had become for the moment a military State,
and necessarily assumed a far grander position in the
world than she could support when she disbanded
her army and became constitutional again. The
Protectorate was fortunate in coming to an end
before its true character was understood. By the
law of its nature it was drawn towards war. It is
an illusion to suppose that the Puritanism of the
Protector or of his party was analogous to modern
Liberalism, and therefore inspired a repugnance to
war. Eead Marvell's panegyric on him. The virtu-
ous poet predicts that Oliver will be ere long "a
Csesar to Gaul and a Hannibal to Italy." Does the
prospect shock him ? Not at all ; lest his hero should
falter in the course, he exhorts him to " march inde-
fatigably on," and bids him remember that " the same
acts that did gain a power must it maintain." Nor
when we examine the Protector's foreign policy do
we find him unmindful of this principle. He seems
to look forward to a religious war, in which England
will play the same part in Europe that he himself
with his Ironsides has played in England. Some of
his modern admirers have perceived this. "In truth,"
writes Macaulay, " there was nothing which Cromwell
had, for his own sake and that of his family, so much

134 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

reason to desire as a general religious war in Europe.
. . . UnlmppiUj for him he had no opportunity of dis-
playing his admirable military talents except against
the inhabitants of the British isles." We may well,
I think, shudder at the thought of the danger which
was removed by the fall of the Protectorate.

On the side of the Continent this imperialist policy
was developed but imperfectly, but on the side of the
New World, where it was borne upon the tide of the
time, it went further and had more lasting conse-
quences. Here indeed Cromwell's policy is only that
of the Long Parliament before him and of Charles II.
after him. It has indeed a peculiarly absolute and
unscrupulous tinge. Of his own pure will, without
consulting directly or indirectly the people, and in
spite of opposition in his Council, he plunges the
country into a war with Spain. This war is com-
menced after the manner of the old Elizabethan
sea-rovers by a sudden descent without previous
quarrel or declaration of war upon St. Domingo. I
remember hearing a predecessor of my own. Sir J.
Stephen, say in this place that, if any of his hearers
had a taste for iconoclasm, he could recommend him
to employ it upon the buccaneering Cromwell. Per-
haps this may seem too severe, when we remember
the lawlessness of all maritime war at that time.
What I wish you to remark is the continuity that
holds together this Cromwellian policy with the
Elizabethan, and equally with the policy which
the nation pursued in the eighteenth century, when
in 1739 it went to war again to break the Spanish

VI COMMERCE AND WAR 135

monopoly. In all these cases alike you see the close
connection which the old colonial system established
between war and trade.

But the great characteristic of this Commonwealth
period, indeed of the whole middle part of the seven-
teenth century, is not war with Spain, but war with
Holland. If Cromwell's breach with Spain shows
most strikingly by its violent suddenness the spirit
of the new commercial policy, yet it is capable of
being misinterpreted. For Spain was the great
Catholic Power, and therefore it miglit be imagined
that our war with her was caused by the other great
historic cause which then acted, by the Eeformation,
and not by the New World. But what of our war
with Holland ? Had the Reformation been the
dominating cause in the seventeenth century, we
should have seen England and Holland in permanent
brotherly alliance. It is the great proof that this
cause is fast giving way to the other, viz. the great
trade-rivalry produced by the New World, that all
through the middle of the seventeenth century
England and Holland wage great naval wars of a
character such as had never been seen before. These
wars are seldom sufficiently considered as a Avhole,
and therefore are explained by causes which in fact
were only secondary. This is especially the case
with the war of 1672, for which Charles II. and the
Cabal are responsible. It is cited as a proof of the
reckless immorality of that Government, that it
combined with the Catholic Government of Louis
XIV. to strike a deadly blow at the brother Pro-

136 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect,

testant Power, and that it did so for a dynastic
interest, for the purpose of overthrowing the oli-
garchic or Louvestein faction and raising to power
Charles II. 's nephew, the young Prince of Orange.
And no doubt Charles II. had this object. Never-
theless there was nothing new at that time either in
war with Holland or alliance with France. Instead
of suddenly reversing the foreign policy of the
country, Charles here followed precedents set by
the Commonwealth and by Cromwell, for the former
had waged fierce war with Holland, and the latter
had entered into alliance with France. Accordingly
the Government was supported by some of those
who inherited the tradition of the Commonwealth.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, a man of Cromwellian ideas,
supported it by quoting the old words Delenda est
Carthago. In other words: "Holland is our great
rival in trade, on the Ocean and in the New World.
Let us destroy her, though she be a Protestant Power ;
let us destroy her with the help of a Catholic Power."
These were the maxims of the Commonwealth and of
the Protector, because, Puritans though they were,
and though they had risen up against Popery, they
understood that in their age the struggle of the
Churches was falling into the background, and that
the rivalry of the maritime Powers for trade and
empire in the New World was taking its place as the
question of the day.

And thus we are able to fill up the large outline
of the history of Greater Britain. We saw in the
Elizabethan war with Spain the movement, the

VI COMMEKCE AND WAR 137

fermentation out of which it sprang. Under the
first two Stuarts we see it actually come into exist-
ence by the settlement of Virginia, New England
and Maryland. At a later time, in the eighteenth
century, it is seen to engage, now more mature, in a
long duel with Greater France. What occupies the
interval 1 This is the foimdation of the English
na,vj and the great duel with Holland. It covers
the middle of the seventeenth century, it embraces our
first great naval wars, and the following acquisitions :
— Jamaica conquered under Cromwell from Spain,
Bombay received by Charles II. from Portugal, New
York acquired also by Charles II. from Holland.

This great struggle with Holland is followed by a
period of close alliance with Holland, represented in
the career of ^Yilliam of Orange. From our point
of view this appears as a temporary revival of the
Reformation-contest. By the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes the world is thrown back into the religious
wars of the sixteenth century. The New World
passes for a time into the background ; once more
the question is of Catholicism or religious freedom.
Once more therefore the two Protestant Powers
stand shoulder to shoulder against France. William
rules both countries and the trade-rivalry is adjourned
for a time.

LECTUEE VII

PHASES OF EXPANSION

The object I professed to set before myself in these
lectures was to present English history to you in
such a light that the interest of it instead of gradually
diminishing should go on increasing to the close.
You will perceive by this time in what way I hope
to do this. It is impossible that the history of any
State can be interesting, unless it exhibits some sort
of development. Political life that is uniform has
no history, however prosperous it may be. Now it
appears to me that English historians fail in the
later periods of England, because they have traced
one great development to its completion, and do not
perceive that, if they would advance further, they
must look out for some other development. More
or less consciously, they have always before their
minds the idea of constitutional liberty. This idea
suffices until they reach the licvolution of 1688,
perhaps even until they reach the accession of the

LECT. VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 139

House of Brunswick. But after this it fails them.
Not that development ceases in the English Con-
stitution at that point, nor even that to the political
student it becomes less interesting. But it begins to
be gradual and quiet ; the tension is relaxed ; dram-
atic incident henceforth must be looked for elsewhere.
Our historians are not sufficiently alive to this. It
may be true that George III.'s use of royal influence
attained in an insidious way objects similar to those
which the Stuarts tried to reach by prerogative or
by military force. But when Wilkes and Home
Tooke, Chatham and Fox are brought forward to
play the parts of Prynne and Milton, Pym and
Shaftesbury, the interest of the reader grows languid.
He seems to have before him the feeble second part
of some striking story. Those parliamentary strug-
gles which in the seventeenth century were so intense,
seem, when repeated in the eighteenth, to have
something conventional about them.

The mistake, according to me, lies in selecting
these struggles to fill the foreground of the scene.
It is a misrepresentation to describe England in
George III.'s reign as mainly occupied in resisting
the encroachments of a somewhat narrow-minded
king. "We exaggerate the importance of these petty
struggles. England was then engaged in other and
vaster enterprises. She was not wholly occupied in
doing over again what she had done before ; she was
also doing new and great things. And these new
things had vast consequences, which have changed
and are at this day changing the face of the world.

140 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND ^ lbot.

It is the historian's business then to open a new
scene, and to bring into the foreground new actors.

I have now brought out in strong relief this new
development in English history. I have shown that
in the same seventeenth century, when England at
home was victoriously reconciling her old Teutonic
liberties to modern political conditions, and finding a
place in England for the professional soldier and for
the religious dissenter, she was also at work abroad.
She, along with the other four western States of
Europe, was founding an empire in the New World.
I have shown also that, though she began this work
later than some other States, and did not for a long
time make strikingly rapid progress in it, yet in the
end she left all her rivals behind, so that she alone
now remains in possession of a great New World
empire. Now it was in the eighteenth century, just
when the struggle for liberty was over, that she
began thus to take the lead in the New World, and
it is now, in the nineteenth century, that she finds
herself called upon to consider what new shape she
shall give to the Empire she possesses. It plainly
follows that here is the new development we are in
search of — the development which ought to make
the principal study of historians from the time when
they find constitutional liberty a completed develop-
ment, and therefore an exhausted topic. For here is
a development which ever since the seventeenth
century has been steadily growing in magnitude;
here is a development which binds together the
future with the past.

VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 141

If then we give it the principal place, we escape
the perplexity into which most historians fall, who
strangely find the history grow less and less interest-
ing as England grows greater and greater. But at
the same time we shall find much rearrangement
necessary. For we shall have adopted a new
standard of importance for events, and a new
principle of grouping. Colonial affairs and Indian
affairs are usually pushed a little on one side by
historians. They are relegated to supplementary
chapters. It spems to be assumed that affairs which
are remote from England cannot deserve a leading
place in a history of England, as if the England of
which histories are written were the island so-called,
and not the political union named after the island,
which is quite capable of expanding so as to cover
half the globe. To us England will be wherever
English people are found, and we shall look for its
history in whatever places witness the occurrences
most important to Englishmen. And therefore, as
in the periods when the liberties of England were in
danger we seek it principally at Westminster in the
Parliamentary debates, so in these periods, of which
the characteristic is that England is expanding into
Greater Britain, English history will be wherever
this expansion is taking place, even when the scene
is as remote as Canada or as India. We shall avoid
the error commonly committed in these later periods
of confounding the history of England with the
history of Parliament. The rearrangement which
such a change will involve may affect especially the

142 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. But in the
seventeenth century also, though wo may not wish to
displace the accepted arrangement, which has refer-
ence to the struggle for liberty with the Stuart
Kings, yet we must keep in our minds at the same
time another arrangement, founded on the principle of
marking the stages in the advance of Greater Britain.
The accepted arrangement is according to reigns
and dynasties, and in each reign it ranks as the
principal occurrences the dealings of the sovereign
with Parliament. On this system the leading
demarcations are the accession of the House of
Brunswick, and beyond that the accession of the
House of Stuart, and in the middle the Great
Interregnum and the Revolution of 1688. We make
far too much of these demarcations even when they
are unobjectionable. We imagine a much greater
difference than really existed between the age of
George I. and that of Queen Anne, between that of
William IH. and that of Charles II., between the
Restoration and the Commonwealth, between the age
of James I. and the Elizabethan age. The Revolu-
tion was not nearly so revolutionary, nor the Re-
storation so reactionary, as is commonly supposed.
But if once we begin to think of England as a living
organism, which in the Elizabethan age began a
process of expansion, never intermitted since, into
Greater Britain, we shall find these divisions alto-
gether useless, and shall feel the want of a completely
new set of divisions to mark the successive stages of
the expansion.

vn PHASES OF EXPANSION 143

I have already pointed out some of the principal
of these divisions. But it will be well to present a
connected view of English history as it appears when
arranged on this principle.

The history of the expansion of England must neces-
sarily begin with the two ever-memorable voyages of
Columbus and Vasco da Gama in the reign of Henry
VII. From that moment the position of England
among countries was entirely changed, though almost
a century elapsed before the change became visible to
all the world. In our rearrangement this tract of
time forms one period, the characteristic of which is
that England is gradually finding out her vocation to
the sea. We pass by the domestic disturbances,
political, religious and social, of that crowded age.
We see nothing of the Reformation and its conse-
quences. What we see is simply that England is
slowly and gradually taking courage to claim her
share with the Spanish and Portuguese in the new
world that has been thrown open. There are a few
voyages to Newfoundland and Labrador, then there
is a series of bold adventures, which, however, proved
not to have been happily planned. Our explorers,
naturally but unfortunately, turned their attention
to the Polar regions, and so discovered notliing but
frozen Oceans, while their rivals were making a
triumphal progress " on from island unto island at the
gateways of the day." Next comes the scries of
buccaneering raids upon the Spanish settlements, in
the course of which the English earned at least a
character for seamanship and audacity.

144 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

The Spanish Armada marks the moment when
this period of preparation or apprenticeship closes.
The internal modification in the nation is now com-
plete. It has turned itself round, and looks now no
longer towards the Continent but towards the Ocean
and the New World. It has become both maritime
and industrial.

On the other system of arrangement the accession
of the House of Stuart is thought to mark a decline.
The Tudor sovereignty, popular and exercised with
resolution and insight, makes way for a monarchy of
divine right, pedantic and unintelligent. Nevertheless
in our view there is no decline ; there is continuous
development. The personal unlikeness of James and
Charles to Elizabeth is a matter of indifference. The
foundation of Greater Britain now takes place. John
Smith, the Pilgrim Fathers, and Calvert establish the
colonies of Virginia, New England, and Maryland, of
which the last marks its date by its name, taken from
Queen Henrietta Maria.

Greater -Britain henceforth exists, for henceforth
Englishmen are living on both sides of the Atlantic
Ocean. It received at once a peculiar stamp from
the circumstances of the time. Greater Spain had
been an artificial fabric, to which much thought and
skilful contrivance had been applied by the Home
Government. Authority, both civil and ecclesiastical,
was more rigorous there than at home. This was
because the Spanish settlements, as producing a
steady revenue, were all-important to the mother-
country. The English settlements, not being thus

vn PHASES OF EXPANSION 145

important, were neglected. This neglect had a
momentous result owing to the discord just then
springing up in England. Colonies, if not sources of
wealth, might at least be useful as places of refuge
for unauthorised opinions. Half a century before the
voyage of the Mayflower Coligny ^ had given this
turn to colonisation. He had conceived that idea of
toleration along with local separation of rival religions,
which was afterwards realised within France itself by
the Edict of Nantes. How different, be it said in
passing, would the world now be, if a Huguenot
France had sprung up beyond the Atlantic ! The
idea of Coligny was now realised by England." As
her settlements were made at a critical moment of
dissension, an impulse to emigration was supplied
which would not otherwise have existed, but at the
same time there was introduced a subtle principle
of opposition between the New World and the Old.
The emigrants departed with a secret determination,
which was to bear fruit later, not of carrying England
with them, but of creating something which should
not be England.

The second phase of Greater Britain was brought
on by the military revolution of 1648. After the
triumph of the Commonwealth at home, it had to

^ See au excellent account of his schemes in Mr. Besant'a
Coligny.

^ In the charter of Rhode Island, 1663, it is expressed distinctly.
Religious liberty is granted " for that the same by reason of the
remote distances of those places will, as \Vu hope, be no breach of
the unity and uniformity established in this nation." Charles 11,
in his religious policy seems always to keep his maternal grand-
father in view.

L

146 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

wage a new war with royalism by sea. From our
point of view this second contest is more important
than the first; for the army created by Cromwell
was destined soon to dissolve again, but the maritime
power organised by Vane and wielded by Blake is the
English navy of all later time. Our maritime ascend-
ency has its beginning here. " At this moment,"
says Kanke, " England awoke more clearly than ever
before to a consciousness of the advantage of her
geographical position, of the fact that a maritime
vocation was that to which she was called by nature
herself." Cromwell's attack upon the Spanish Empire
and seizure of Jamaica, the most high-handed measure
recorded in the modern history of England, is the
natural effect of this new consciousness awakening at a
moment when England found herself a military State.
The next phase is the duel with Holland. This
belongs most peculiarly to the first half of the reign
of Charles II., when it fills the foreground of the
historic stage ; but it had begun long before at the
massacre of Amboyna in 1623, and had grown in
prominence under the Commonwealth. It may be
said to end in the year 1674, when Charles II. with-
drew from the attack on Holland, which he had made
in combination with Louis XIV. That was a great
moment of glory for Holland, when in such extreme
danger she found a new champion in the family which
had saved her Ijefore, when a new Stadtholder, a
second William the Silent, stood in the breach to
withstand the new invasion. Nevertheless it was
the beginning of the decline of Holland. For in this

VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 147

second great struggle of the Dutch Republic, though
she showed the old heroism, she could not have
all the old good fortune. She could not again
positively prosper and grow rich by means of war,
as she had done before. This time she was at
war not with Spain, the possessor of infinite colonies,
which she could plunder at leisure, but only with
France ; her fleet did not now sweep the seas un-
opposed, but was confronted with the powerful navy
of England ; and the very source of her wealth, her
mercantile marine, was struck at by the English
Navigation Act. Accordingly, though she saved her-
self, and afterwards had another age of great deeds,
the decay of Holland begins now to set in ; it becomes
visible to all the world at the death of her great
Stadtholder, the last of the old line, our William III.
England, richer by nature, and not tried by invasion,
begins now to draw ahead, and the 6aKaa<T0Kparia
of Holland terminates.

The reign of Charles H. stands out in the history
of Greater Britain as a period of remarkable progress.^
It was then especially that the American Colonies
took the character which they had when they
attracted so much attention in the next century, of
an uninterrupted series of settlements extending
from South to North along the Atlantic coast. For
it was in this reign that the Carolinas and Pennsyl-
vania were founded and that the Dutch were expelled

' "The spirit of enterprise," writes Mr. Saintsbury, "and the
desire for colonisation appear to have licen almost as strong at that
period as in the days of Elizabeth and James."

148 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect

from New York and Delaware. Considered as a
whole and judged by the standard of the time, this
American settlement begins now to be most imposing.
Its distinction is that it has a population which is at
once large and almost purely European. Through-
out the Spanish settlements the Europeans Avere
blended and lost in an ocean of Indian and half-Indian
population. The Dutch colonies naturally wanted
population, because the Dutch mother -country was
so small ; they were generally little moi'e than
commercial stations. The French colonies, which
now begin to attract attention, were also weak in
this respect. Already in the daAvn of French colonial
greatness might be perceived a deficiency in genuine
colonising power, and perhaps also that slowness of
multiplication which has characterised the French
since. The row of English colonies on the Atlantic
was perhaps already the most solid achievement in
the way of colonisation that any European state
could boast, though it would seem insignificant
enough if judged by a modern standard. The whole
population at the end of Charles II. 's reign was about
two hundred thousand, but it was a population
which doubled itself every quarter of a century.

What now is the next phase of Greater Britain 1
It enters now, in conjunction with Holland, upon a
period of resistance to the aggressions of Greater
France created by Colbert. From our point of view
the administration of Colbert means the deliberate
entrance of France into the competition of the
Western States for the New World. France had

VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 149

not been much, if at all, behind England in her early
explorations. Jacqties Cartier had made himself a
name earlier than Frobisher and Drake ; Coligny had
had schemes of colonisation earlier than Kaleigh.
Acadie and Canada were settled and the town of
Quebec founded under the guidance of Samuel
Champlain about the time of the voyage of the
Mayflower. But, as usual, her European entangle-
ments checked the progress of France in the New
World. The Thirty Years' War had given her an
opportunity of laying the foundation of a European
Ascendency. All through the middle of that century
she was engaged in almost uninterrupted European
war. Of the great Spanish estate which is in liquid-
ation she leaves the colonial part to Holland and
England, because she naturally covets for herself
that which lies close to her frontier, the Burgundian
part. In the days of Cromwell therefore she has
fallen somewhat behind in the colonial race. Mazarin
seems to have little comprehension of the oceanic
policy of the age. But as soon as he is gone, and
the war is over, and a tranquil period has set in,
Colbert rises to guide her into this new path. He
appropriates all the great commercial inventions of
the Dutch Republic, particularly the Chartered Com-
pany. He labours, and for a time with success, to
give to France, the State pre-eminently of feudalism,
aristocracy and chivalry, an industrial and modern
character, such as the attraction of the New World
was impressing upon the maritime states. He figures
in Adam Smith as the representative statesman of

150 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect

the mercantile system, and indeed, as the minister of
Louis XIV., he seemed to embody that perversion of
the commercial spirit which filled Europe with war,
so that, as Adam Smith himself says, "commerce,
which ought naturally to be, among nations as among
individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has
become the most fertile source of discord and
animosity."

We have remarked that the seventeenth century
is controlled by two great forces, of which one, the
Reformation, is decreasing, while the other, which is
the attraction of the New World, increases, and that
the student must continually beware of attributing
to one of these forces results produced by the other.
Thus under Cromwell, as under Elizabeth before him,
the commercial influence works disguised under the
religious. When now, later in the century, the duel
between the two Sea -Powers is succeeded by their
alliance against France, we have once more to unravel
the same tangle of causation. This alliance endured
through two great wars and through two English
reigns, and it seems, when we trace the growth of it
from 1674 to the Revolution of 1688, to be an alliance
of the two Protestant Powers against a new Catholic
aggression. For in those years there set in one of
the strangest and most disastrous reactions that
history has to record. The Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes revived the politics of the sixteenth
century. Coinciding nearly in time with the acces-
sion of the Catholic James II. in England, it created
a world-wide religious panic. History seemed to be

VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 151

rolled back just a century, the age of the League,
of Philip II. and William the Silent, seemed to have
returned, at a time when it was thought that the
balance of the Confessions had been established
firmly thirty years before in the Treaty of Westphalia,
and when the age had during those thirty years been
drifting in the other direction of colonial expansion.
The ideas of Colbert seem suddenly to be forgotten,
the wealth he has amassed is wasted, the navy he
has founded is exposed to destruction at La Hogue.
It is against this Catholic Eevival that England and
Holland first form their alliance.

But it was only for a moment, and less really
than apparently, that the New World was thus
pushed into the background. If we trace history
upward instead of downward, if we look from the
Treaty of Utrecht back upon the alliance of the Sea
Powers which triumphed there, we see an alliance of
quite a different kind. There has been no breach of
continuity; Marlborough has the same position as
William, and the alliance is stiU directed against the
same Louis XIV. But the religious warmth has
faded out of the war, which now betrays by the
settlement made at Utrecht its intensely commercial
character. That war h^s such a splendour in our
annals, and the title we give it, " War of the Spanish
Succession," has such a monarchical ring, tliat we
think it a good sample of the fantastic, barbaric,
wasteful wars of the olden time. It is of this war
that " little Peterkin " desires to know " what good
came of it at last." In reality it is the most business-

152 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

like of all our wars, and it was waged in the interest
of English and Dutch merchants whose trade and
livelihood were at stake. All those colonial questions,
which had been setting Europe at discord ever since
the New World was laid open, were brought to a
head at once by the prospect of a union between
France and the Spanish Empire, for such a union
would close almost the whole New World to the
English and Dutch, and throw it open to the
countrymen of Colbert, who were at that moment
exploring and settling the Mississippi. Behind all
the courtly foppery of the Grand Si^cle commercial
considerations now rule the world as they had never
ruled it before, and as they continued to rule it
through much of the prosaic century that was then
opening.

In the midst of this war a memorable event befell,
which belongs to this development in the fullest
sense, the legislative union of England and Scotland.
Eead the history of it in Burton ; you will see that
it marks the beginning of modern Scottish history,
just as the Armada that of modern English history.
It is the entrance of Scotland into the competition
for the New World. No nation has since, in propor-
tion to its numbers, reaped so much profit from the
New World as the Scotch, but before the Union
they had no position there. They were excluded
from the English trade, and the poverty of the
country did not allow them successfully to compete
with the other nations on their own account. In
William III.'s reign they made a great national

VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 153

effort on the plan then usual. They tried to appro-
priate to themselves a territory in the New World.
They set up the Darien Company, which was to
carve a piece for the benefit of Scotland out of the
huge territory claimed by Spain as its own. This
enterprise failed, and it was out of the excitement
and disappointment caused by the failure that the
negotiations arose which ended in the Union. England
gained by the Union security in time of war against
a domestic foe ; Scotland gained admission into the
New World.

In the history of the expansion of England one
of the greatest epochs is marked by the Treaty of
Utrecht. In our survey this date stands out almost
as prominently as the date of the Spanish Armada,
for it marks the beginning of England's supremacy
At the time of the Armada we saw England enter-
ing the race for the first time ; at Utrecht England
wins the race. Then she had the audacity to defy
a power far greater than her own, and her success
brought her forward and gave her a place among
great states. She had advanced steadily since, but in
the first half of the seventeenth century Holland had
attracted more attention and admiration, and in the
second half France. From about 1660 to 1700
France had been the first state in the world beyond
all dispute. But the Treaty of Utrcclit left England
the first state in the world, and she continued for
some years to be first without a rival. Her reputa-
tion in other countries, the respect felt for her claims
in literature, philosophy, scholarship and science, date

154 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.

from this period. If ever, it was after this time that
she held the same kind of intellectual primacy which
France had held before. Much of this splendour was
transient, but England has remained ever since that
date on a higher level than ever before. It has been
universally allowed ever since that no state is more
powerful than England. But especially it has been
admitted that in wealth and commerce and in maritime
power, no state is equal to her. This was partly
because her rivals had fallen off in power, partly
because she herself had advanced.

The decline of Holland had by this time become
perceptible. So long as William lived, she enjoyed
the benefit of his renown. But in Marlborough's
time, and from that time forward, languor and the
desire of repose grow upon her. Her powers have
been overstrained in war with France and in competi-
tion with England. Never again does she display her
old energy. Thus the old rival has fallen behind.
The new rival, France, is for the moment over-
whelmed by the disasters of the war, and she, whose
affairs thirty years before had been set in order by
the greatest financier of the age, is now burdened
with a bankruptcy she will carry with her to the
Revolution. Her bold snatch at the trade of the
New World has not succeeded. She has in a sense
won Spain, but not that which made Spain valuable,
viz. a share in the American monopoly. Some part
of the loss was indeed soon to be repaired. France
was soon to show much colonial enterprise and
intelligence. Dupleix in India, La Galissoni^re in

vu PHASES OF EXPANSION 155

Canada, the Bailli Suffren on the sea, were to carry
the name of France high in the New World and
maintain for a long time an equal competition with
England. But at the moment of the Peace of
Utrecht so much could hardly have been foreseen.
Fresh from her victories, England seemed at that
moment even greater than she was.

The positive gains of England were Acadie, or
Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland (surrendered by
France) and the Asiento Compact granted by Spain.
In other words, the first step was taken towards the
destruction of Greater France by depriving her of
one of her three settlements, Acadie, Canada, and
Louisiana, in North America, And the first great
breach was made in that intolerable Spanish mono-
poly, which then closed the greater part of Central
and Southern America to the trade of the world.
England was allowed to furnish Spanish America
with slaves, and along with slaves she soon managed
to smuggle in other commodities.

I must pause here for a moment to make a general
observation. You will remark that in this survey of
the growth of Greater Britain I do not make the
smallest attempt, either to glorify the conquests
made, or to justify the means adopted by our
countrymen, any more than, when I point out that
England outstripped her four rivals in the competi-
tion, I have the smallest thought of claiming for
England any superior virtue or valour. I have not
called upon you to admire or approve Drake or
Hawkins, or the Commonwealth or Cromwell, or the

156 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

Government of Charles II. Indeed it is not easy to
approve the conduct of those who built up Greater
Britain, though there is plenty to admire in their
achievements, and much less certainly to blame or to
shudder at than in the deeds of the Spanish adven-
turers. But I am not writing the biography of these
men ; it is not as a biographer nor as a poet nor as
a moralist that I deal with their actions. I am con-
cerned always with a single problem only, that of
causation. My question always is, How came this
enterprise to be undertaken, how came it to svucceed 1
I ask it not in order that we may imitate the actions
we read of, but in order that we may discover the
laws by which states rise, expand and prosper or fall
in this world. In this instance I have also the
further object, viz. to throw light on the question
whether Greater Britain, now that it exists, may be
expected to prosper and endure or to fall. Perhaps
you may ask whether we can expect or wish it to
prosper, if crime has gone to the making of it. But
the God who is revealed in history does not usually
judge in this way. History does not show that
conquests made lawlessly in one generation are
certain or even likely to be lost again in another :
and, as government is never to be confounded with
property, it does not appear that states have always
even a right, much less that they are bound, to
restore gains that may be more or less ill-gotten.
The Norman conquest was lawless enough, yet it
prospered and prospered permanently ; we ourselves
own this land of England by inheritance from Saxon

vn PHASES OF EXPANSION 157

pirates. The title of a nation to its territory is
generally to be sought in primitive times, and would
be found, if we could recover it, to rest upon violence
and massacre ; the territory of Greater Britain was
acquired in the full light of history and in part by
unjustifiable means, but less unrighteously than the
territory of many other Powers, and perhaps far less
unrighteously than that of those states whose power
is now most ancient and established. If we compare
it with other Empires in respect of its origin, we
shall see that it has arisen in the same way ; that its
founders have had the same motives, and these not
mainly noble ; that they have displayed much fierce
covetousness, mixed with heroism ; that they have
not been much troubled by moral scruples, at least in
their dealings with enemies and rivals, though they
have often displayed virtuous self-denial iu their
dealings among themselves. So far we shall find
Greater Britain to be like other Empires, and like
other states of whose origin we have any knowledge ;
but its annals are on the whole better, not worse,
than those of most. They are conspicuously better
than those of Greater Spain, which are infinitely
more stained with cruelty and rapacity. In some
pages of these annals there is a real elevation of
thought and an intention at least of righteous deal-
ing, which are not often met with in the history of
colonisation. Some of these founders remind us of
Abraham and Aeneas. The crimes on the other
hand are such as have been almost universal in
colonisation.

158 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

I make these remarks in this place because I have
now before me the greatest of these crimes. England
had taken some share in the slave-trade as early as
Elizabeth's age, when John Hawkins distinguished
himself as the first Englishman who stained his hands
with its atrocity. You will find in Hakluyt his own
narrative, how he came in 1567 upon an African
town, of which the huts were covered with dry palm-
leaves, how he set fire to it, and out of " 8000
inhabitants succeeded in seizing 250 persons, men,
women and children." But we are not to suppose
that from that time until the abolition of the slave-
trade England took a great or leading share in it.
England had then, and for nearly half a century
afterwards, no colonies in which there could be a
demand for slaves, and when she acquired colonies
they were not mining colonies like the first colonies
of Spain, in which the demand for slaves had been
urgent. Like our colonial empire itself, our parti-
cipation in the slave-trade was the gradual growth of
the seventeenth century. By the Treaty of Utrecht
it was, as it were, established, and became " a central
object of English policy."^ From this date I am
afraid we took the leading share, and stained our-
selves beyond other nations in the monstrous and
enormous atrocities of the slave-trade.

This simply means that we were not better in our
principles in this respect than other nations, and that.
having now at last risen to the highest place among

* Tlie plirase is borrowed from Mr. Lecky. See History of
England in the Jiighteenth Century, ii. p. 13.

VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 159

the trading-nations of the world, and having extorted
the Asiento from Spain by our military successes, we
accidentally obtained the largest share in this wicked
commerce. It is fair that we should bear this in
mind while we read the horror-striking stories which
the party of Abolition afterwards published. Our
guilt in this matter was shared by all the colonising
nations ; Ave were not the inventors of the crime, and,
if within a certain period we were more guilty than
other nations, it is some palliation that we published
our own guilt, repented of it, and did at last renounce
it. But taken together, the whole successful develop-
ment which culminated at Utrecht secularised and
materialised the English people as nothing had ever
done before. Never were sordid motives so supreme,
never was religion and every high influence so much
discredited, as in the thirty years that followed.
There has been a disposition to antedate this corrup-
tion, and to attribute it to the wrong cause. It was
not so much after the Restoration, as after the
Revolution, and especially after the reign of Queen
Anne, that cynicism and corruption set in. In his
well-known essay on "the Comic Dramatists of the
Restoration " Macaulay attributes to the Restoration
the cynicism of four writers, Wycherley, Congreve,
Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, of which writers three did
not write a play till several years after the Revolu-
tion !

We have arrived then at the stage when England,
in the course of her expansion, stands out for the
first time as the supreme maritime and commercial

160 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.

Power in the World. It is evidently her connection
with the New World that has given her this char-
acter ; nevertheless she did not yet appear at least
to ordinary eyes as absolutely the first colonial
Power. In extent her territories were still insignifi-
cant by the side of those of Spain, and much inferior
to those of Portugal. They were but a fringe on the
Atlantic coast of North America, a few Western
Islands and a few commercial stations in India.
What was this compared with the mighty vice-
royalties of Spain in Southern and Central America 1
And, as I have said before, France as a colonial
Power might seem in some respects superior to
England ; her colonial policy might seem more able
and likely in the end to be more successful.

The next stage in the history of Greater Britain
is one which I have already surveyed. Holland
being now in decline, the rivalry of England is hence-
forth with Spain and France, Powers henceforth
united by a Family Compact. But the pressure of it
falls mainly on France, since it is France, not Spain,
that is neighbour to England both in America and
in India. That duel of France and England begins,
which I have already described. The decisive event
of it is the Seven Years' War and the new position
given to England by the Treaty of Paris in 1762.
Here is the culminating point of English power in
the eighteenth century; nay, relatively to other
states England has never since been so great. For a
moment it seems that the whole of North America is
destined to be hers, and to make for ever a part of

VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 161

Greater Britain. Such an Empire would not have
been greater in mere extent than that which Spain
abeady possessed; but in essential greatness and
power how infinitely superior ! The Spanish Empire
had the fundamental defect of not being European
in blood. Not only did the part of the population
which was European belong to a race which even in
Europe appeared to be in decline, but there was
another large part which had a mixture of barbarism
in its blood, and another larger still whose blood was
purely barbaric. The English Empire was through-
out of civilised blood, except so far as it had a slave-
population. But the example of antiquity shows
that a separate slave-caste, discharging all drudgery
and unskilled labour, is consistent with a very high
form of civilisation. Much more serious is the de-
terioration of the national type by barbaric inter-
mixture.

In this culminating phase England becomes an
object of jealousy and dread to all Europe, as Spain
and afterwards France had been in the seventeenth
century. It was about the time when she won her
first victories in the colonial duel with France, that
an outcry began to be raised against her as the
tyrant of the seas. In 1745, just after the capture
of Louisburg, the French Ambassador at St. Peters-
burg handed in a note, in which he complained of
the maritime despotism of the English, and their
purpose of destroying the trade and navigation of all
other nations ; he asserted the necessity of a com-
bination to maintain the maritime balance. England's

M

162 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

former ally joins in the complaint, for there appeared
about the same time a pamphlet entitled "ia voix d'un
citoyen h Amsterdam" in which the cry Delenda est
Carthago, formerly raised by Shaftesbury against
Holland, is now echoed back by a certain Maubert
against England. " Mettons nous," he exclaims, " avec
la France au niveau de la Grande Bretagne, en-
richissons-nous de ses propres f antes et du d^lire
ambitieux de ses Ministres." And then he suggests a
Coalition for the purpose of procuring the repeal of
the Navigation Act. From this time till 1815
jealousy of England is one of the great motive forces
of European politics. It led to the intervention of
France in America, and to the Armed Neutrality;
later it became a kind of passion in the mind of the
First Napoleon, and lured him gradually on, partly
against his will, to make the conquest of Europe.

So far we have traced a course of uninterrupted
continuous expansion. Slowly but surely England
has grown greater and greater. But now occurs an
event wholly new in kind, a sudden shock, proving
that in the New World there might be other hostile
Powers beside the rival States of Europe. The
secession of the American colonies is one of those
events, the immense significance of which could not
even at the moment be overlooked. It was felt at
the time to be pregnant with infinite consequences,
and so it has proved, though the consequences have
not been precisely of the kind that was expected. It
was the first stirring of free-will on the part of the
New World Avhich had remained, since Columbus

VII PHASES OF EXPANSION 163

discovered it, and since the Spanish Adventurers
ruthlessly destroyed whatever germs of civilisation it
possessed, in a kind of nonage. But now it asserts
itself ; it accomplishes a revolution in the European
style, appealing to all the principles of European
civilisation. This was in itself a stupendous event,
perhaps in itself greater than that French EeA'-olution,
which followed so soon and absorbed so completely
the attention of mankind. But it might have seemed
at the moment to be the fall of Greater Britain. For
the thirteen colonies which then seceded were almost
all the then colonial Empire of Britain. And their
secession seemed at the moment a proof demonstra-
tive that any Greater Britain of the kind must always
be unnatural and short-lived. Nevertheless a century
has passed and there is still a Greater Britain, and
on more than the old scale of magnitude.

This event will be the subject of the next lecture.

LECTUEE VIII

SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN

As objects change their outline when the observer
changes his point of view, so the history of a state
may be made to take many forms. The outline I
have given of English history in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries is very different from that with
which we are familiar, because I have taken a point
of view from which many things seem great that
before seemed small, and many small that seemed
great, while some things are now outline that were
shading, and others are shading that were outline.

And yet most people think of history as if its
outline were quite fixed and unalterable. Details,
they think, may be more or less accurate, more or less
vivid, in this historian or in that, but the framework
must be the same for all historians. In reality it is
just this framework, the list of great events which
children learn by heart, that is unfixed, unstable,
alterable, though it seems made of cast-iron. For
what makes an event great or little 1 Is the acces-

LECT, viii SCHISM IN GREATEE BRITAIN 165

sion of a king necessarily a great event? At the
moment it seems great, but when the excitement it
causes has subsided, it may appear to have been in
the history of the country no event at all. This
principle consistently applied would produce a re-
volution in our ideas of history. It would show us
that the real history of a state may be quite different
from the conventional, since all or many of the events
that have passed for great may be really unimportant,
and the truly important events may be among those
which have been slightly or not at all recorded.

We must have then a test for the historical im-
portance of events, and to apply this test will be a
principal part of the historian's task. Now what
test shall we apply 1 Shall we say, " The historian
should make prominent those events which are
interesting i" But surely an occurrence may be inter-
esting biographically, or morally, or poetically, and
yet not interesting historically. Shall we say then,
" He is to give to events the importance they were
felt to have at the moment when they happened ; he
is to revive the emotion of the time "1 I maintain
that it is not the business of the historian, as we so
often hear, to put his reader back in the past time, or
to make him regard events as they were regarded by
contemporaries. Where woidd be the use of this'?
Great events are commonly judged by contemporaries
quite wrongly. It is in fact one of the chief functions
of the historian to correct this contemporary judg-
ment. Instead of making us share the emotions of
the passing time, it is his business to point out to us

166 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

that this event, which absorbed the public attention
when it happened, was really of no great importance,
and that event, though it passed almost unnoticed,
was of infinite consequence.

Of all events of English history it is perhaps the
American Revolution that has suffered most from the
application of these wrong tests. Considered as a
mere story or romance, it is not so very interesting.
There is no very wonderful generalship, no very
glorious victory on either side, and of all heroes
Washington is the least dramatic. We forget that
what is not very thrilling as story may be of profound
interest as history. It marks our blindness to this
distinction that we rank the French Revolution,
because of its abundance of personal incidents, so
much before the American. But I think the other
cause of error I mentioned operates in this case even
more fatally. The historian must not indeed be a
novelist, but it is as bad, if not worse, for him to be
a mere newspaper politician. The average contem-
porary view of a great event is almost certain to be
shallow and false. And yet it seems to be the
ambition of our historians to estimate the American
Revolution just as they would have done had they
been members of Parliament at the time of the
administration of Lord North. Instead of trying to
give the philosophy of it and to assign to the event
its due importance in the history of the world, they
seem always making up their minds how it would
have been their duty to vote at this stage of the
proceedings or at that, on the Repeal of the Stamp

VIII SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN 167

Act, or the Boston Port Bill, or the Compromise Act.
I call this the newspaper treatment of affairs. It
waits upon the parliamentary debates, and has an
eye to the fate of the Ministry and to the result of
the next division. In particular it takes up and
dismisses questions as they come, and on each it
contents itself with the smattering of information
which may suffice for the short space that the
question may remain under discussion. All this may
be well enough in its place, but it produces the most
melancholy effect in historical writing. And yet in
the modern periods of England history seems to aim
only at perpetuating such ordinary superficial views
of the moment. It is deeply infected throughout
with the commonplaces of party politics, and in
discussing the greatest questions seems always to
take for its model the newspaper leading-article.

What then is the true test of the historical
importance of events? I say, it is their pregnancy,
or in other words the greatness of the consequences
likely to follow from them. On this principle I have
argued that in the eighteenth century the expansion
of England is historically far more important than all
domestic questions and movements. Look at the
great personage who dominates English politics
through the whole middle period of that century, the
elder Pitt. His greatness is throughout identified
with the expansion of England ; he is a statesman of
Greater Britain. It is in the buccaneering war with
Spain that he sows his political wild oats ; his glory is
won in the great colonial duel with France ; his old age

168 EXPA2TSI0N OF ENGLAND LBOT.

is spent in striving to avert schism in Greater
Britain.

Look now at the American Eevolution. In
pregnancy this event is evidently unique. So it has
always struck impartial observers at a distance. But
the newspaper politicians of the day had no time for
such large views. To them it presented itself only in
detail, as a series of questions upon which Parliament
would divide. These questions came before them
mixed up inextricably with other questions, often of
the pettiest kind, yet at the moment not less im-
portant as practical questions of party politics. It is
well known that the Stamp Act passed at first almost
without notice. A Parliament which discussed one
night the Address, another night listened to declama-
tions on the back-stairs influence of Bute and covert
attacks on the Princess Dowager, another night
excited itself over Wilkes and General "Warrants,
found on the Order of the Day a proposal for taxing
the colonies, and passed it as a matter of course with
as little attention as is now given to the Indian
Budget. This is deplorable enough, though it may
be difficult to remedy. But what excuse can there
be for introducing into history such a preposterous
confusion of small things with great 1 And yet
consider whether by our artless chronological method,
and by the slavish obsequiousness with which our
historians follow the order of business fixed by Parlia-
ment, we do not really make much the same mistake
in estimating the American Revolution that was
made by those who jJassed the Stamp Act with

viri SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN 169

scarcely a division. The American question is
introduced in our histories almost as irrationally as
it was introduced at the time into Parliament; it
is introduced without any preparation, and in mere
chronological order among other questions wholly
unlike it. What is the use of history, if it does not
protect us in reviewing the past from those surprises
which in the politics of the day arise inevitably out
of the vastness and multiplicity of modern states 1
And yet the American Revolution surprises us now
in the reading as much as it did our forefathers when
it happened. We too, as we read, have our heads
full of Bute's influence, of the king's marriage, of the
king's illness, of Wilkes and General Warrants, when
suddenly emerges the question of taxing the American
colonies. Soon after we hear of discontent in the
colonies. And then we say, just as our forefathers
did, " By the way what are these colonies, and how
did they come into existence, and how are they
governed 1" The historian, just as a daily paper
might do, undertakes to post us up in the subject.
He stops and inserts at this point a retrospective
chapter, in which he informs us that the country
really has, and has long had, colonies in North
America ! He imparts to us just as much informa-
tion about these colonies as may enable us to under-
stand the debates now about to open on the repeal of
the Stamp Act, and then, apologising for his departure
from chronological order, he hurries back to his
narrative. In this narrative he seems always to
watch proceedings from the reporters' gallery in the

170 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot

House of Commons. You would think it was in
Parliament that the Eevolution took place. America
is the great question of the Eockingham Cabinet,
then later of the North Cabinet. The final loss of
America is considered very important because it
brings down the North Cabinet !

When he relates the conclusion of the Treaty of
1783, the historian will no doubt pause for a moment
and insert a solemn paragraph upon the event, which
he will recognise as momentous. He will explain
that colonies always secede as soon as they feel them-
selves ripe for independence, and that the secession
of America was no loss but rather a gain for England
Hereupon he dismisses the subject, and henceforth
you hear as little of America from him as you
heard before the troubles began. New subjects have
cropped up in the House of Commons. He is busy
with the stormy debates on the India Bill, the
struggle of young Pitt with the Coalition, the West-
minster Election, and a little later the Eegency
Debates. For the English historian is as much
fascinated by Parliament, and pursues all its move-
ments with the same reverential attention, as the old
historians of France show in following the personal
m 0 vements of Louis XIV. When at last he reaches the
wars of the French Eevolution, and the great struggle of
England with Napoleon, then indeed he leaves behind
him finally the inglorious campaigns of Burgoyne
and Cornwallis, and rejoices once more to have to
record really great events and the deeds of great men.

Now I do not think I risk anything by saying in

VIII SCHISM m GREATER BRITAIN 171

contradiction to all this that the American Revolution,
instead of being a tiresome unfortunate business
which may be despatched in a very brief narrative, is
an event not only of greater importance, but on an
altogether higher level of importance than almost
any other in modem English history, and that it is
intrinsically much more memorable to us than our
great war with Revolutionary France, which indeed
only arrives to be at all comparable to it through the
vast indirect consequences produced necessarily by a
war on so large a scale and continued so long. No
doubt it is much more stirring to read of the
Nile, Trafalgar, the Peninsula and "Waterloo, than of
Bunker's Hill, Brandywine, Saratoga and Yorktown,
and this not only because we like better to think of
victory than of defeat, but also because in a military
sense the struggle with France was greater and more
interesting than that with America, and Napoleon,
Nelson and Wellington were greater commanders
than those who appeared in the American Revolution.
But events take rank in history not as they are stir-
ring or exciting, much less as they are gratifying to
ourselves, but as they are pregnant with consequences.
The American Revolution called into existence a
new state, a state inheriting the language and tra-
ditions of England, but taking in some respects a
line of its own, in which it departed from the prece-
dents not only of England but of Europe. This
state was at the time not large in population, though
it was very large in territory, and there were many
chances that it would dissolve again and never grow

172 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

to be very powerful. But it has not dissolved; it
has advanced steadily, and is now, as I have said,
superior not only in territory but in population also
to every European state except Russia. Now it is by
this result that I estimate the historic importance of
the Revolution, since it is with the rise and develop-
ment of states that history deals.

I have called attention to a series of events, the
Spanish Armada, the colonisation of Virginia and
New England, the growth of the English navy and
trade, Cromwell's attack on Spain, the naval wars
with Holland, the colonial expansion of France and
decline of Holland, the maritime supremacy of
England from the Peace of Utrecht, the duel of
England and France for the New World. I have
shown that these events taken together make up the
exipansion of England, that during the seventeenth
century this development is necessarily somewhat
hidden behind the domestic struggle of the nation
with the Stuart kings, but that in the eighteenth
century it ought to be brought into the foreground of
history. Now in this series the next event is the
Schism, the American Revolution, and the historic
magnitude of this event is as much above that of
most earlier events in our history as Greater Britain is
greater than England. For its magnitude is not
to be estimated by inquiring whether Howe and
Cornwallis were great generals, or whether Wash-
ington was or was not a man of genius ! And in
universal history it is scarcely less great than in
the history of England. The foundation in new

Vlil SCHISM IN GKEATEK BKITAIN 173

territory of a state of fifty millions of men, which
before many years will be a hundred millions, — this
by itself is far above the level of all previous history.
No such event had occurred before in full daylight
either in the New World or in the Old. Such a
state has ten times the population that England had
at the Ke volution of 1688, and twice the population
that France had at the Revolution of 1789. This
fact, if it stood by itself, would be enough to show
that time has brought us into a period of greater
magnitudes and higher numbers than past history
has dealt with. But it does not stand by itself.
Bigness no doubt is not necessarily greatness, and in
Asiatic history, though not in European, much larger
figures may be met with, for India and China have a
population not less than five times as large as the
United States. But the peculiarity of this state lies
as much in its quality as in its magnitude. Hitherto,
unless we except the imperfectly known case of China,
all states that have been of very large extent have
been of low organisation.

It had been the boast of England to show how
liberty, such as had been known in the city-states of
Greece and Italy, might be maintained in a nation-
state of the modern type. Now the new state
founded in America inherited this discovery, both
the theory and the practice of it, and has devised all
the modifications that were necessary for the applica-
tion of it to a still larger territory. The consequence
is that this new large state, while in extent it belongs
to the same class as India or Eussia, is in point of

174 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

liberty at the opposite end of the scale. Hegel
described the history of the world as a gradual
development of human free-will. According to him
there are some states in which only one man is free,
others in which a few are free, others in which many.
Now if we were to arrange states in a series according
to the extension of the spirit of freedom, we should
put most of the very large states of the world at the
lower end of such a scale. But no one would hesitate
to put this very large state, the United States, at the
opposite end, as being beyond question the state in
which free-will is most active and alive in every
individual.

Here is a result which is great, and not merely
big ! But to Englishmen the American phenomenon
ought to be infinitely more interesting and important
than to the rest of mankind because of the unique
relation in which they stand to it. There is no other
example in history of two great states related to each
other as England and the United States are related.
True, the South American RepubUcs have sprung
from Spain, and Brazil from Portugal, in the same
way, but they cannot be called great states ; and
besides, as I have said, the South American popula-
tion is to a very large extent of Indian blood. But
this great state, sprvmg from England and predomi-
nantly English in blood, is not practically separated
from us, as their former colonies are separated from
Spain and Portugal, by remoteness of space ; but by
reason of the immense expansion and ubiquitous
activity of both nations is always close to us, always

nil SCHISM IN GKEATER BRITAIN 175

in contact with us, exerts a strong influence upon us
by the strange career it runs and the novel experi-
ments it tries, while at the same time it receives from
us a great influence in many ways, but principally
through our literature.

There is no topic so pregnant as this of the mutual
influence of the branches of the English race. The
whole future of the planet depends upon it. But if
so, what are we to think of the treatment which the
American Revolution receives from our historians?
One would think that the importance of the event
in English history and in universal history were no
concern of theirs. They despatch it very summarily.
They treat us to a constitutional discussion of the
right of taxation and to some glowing descriptions of
Chatham's oratory; in due time they describe the
war, apologise for our defeats, make the most of our
successes, tell some anecdotes of Franklin, estimate
the merits of Washington, and then dismiss the whole
subject, as if it were tedious and did not interest
them. A very minor question in the long Stuart
controversy would occupy them longer, the adven-
tures of Prince Charles Edward would rouse their
imaginations more, the inquiry who was the author
of Junius would excite a more eager curiosity. Is
there not something wrong here 1 Is it not evident
that we have yet to learn what history is ; that what
we have hitherto called history is not history at all,
but ought to be called by some other name, perhaps
biography, perhaps party politics 1 History, I say, is
not constitutional laAv, nor parliamentary tongue-fence,

176 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

nor biography of great men, nor even moral philo-
sophy. It deals with states, it investigates their rise
and development and mutual influence, the causes
which promote their prosperity or bring about their
decay.

But in these lectures on the Expansion of England
the American Revolution is to be discussed in one
aspect only, viz. as the end of our first experiment in
expansion. Like a bubble. Greater Britain expanded
rapidly and then burst. It has since been expanding
again. Can we avoid the obvious inference ?

It is constantly repeated, as if it were beyond dis-
pute, that the secession of the American colonies was
an inevitable result of the natural law which prompts
every colony, when it is ripe, to set up for itself, and
that therefore the statesmen of George Ill's time
who are responsible for it — George Grenville, Charles
Townshend, and Lord North— can be charged with
nothing more serious than hastening perhaps by a
little an unavoidable catastrophe. Noav on this head
I need add but little to what I have said already. So
long as a colony is regarded as a mere estate out of
which the mother-coimtry is to make a pecuniary
profit, of course its allegiance is highly precarious, of
course it will escape as soon as it can. In truth the
illustration drawn from the grown-up son is not half
strong enough for such a case. On that system a
colony is not treated as a child but as a slave, and
it will emancipate itself from such a yoke, not with
gratitude as a grown-up son may do, but with in-
dignation that it should ever, even in its weakness,

VIII SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN 177

have been treated so. The secession of the American
colonies therefore was perhaps inevitable, but only
because, and so far as, they were held under the old
colonial system.

I have explained how difficult it was at that time
to substitute a better system, but a better system
exists, a better system is practicable now. There is
now no reason why a colony after a certain time
should desire emancipation ; nay, even in that age the
practice of our Colonial Government was much better
than the theory. We are not to suppose that the'
colonies rebelled against English rule simply as such.
The Government against which they rebelled was
that of George III. in his first twenty years; now
that period stands marked in our domestic annals
too for the narrow-mindedness and pervefseness of
Government. There was discontent at home as well
as in the colonies. Mansfield on the one side of
politics and Grenville on the other had just at that
time given an interpretation of our liberties which
deprived them of all reality. It was this new-fangled
system, not the ordinary system of English govern-
ment, which, excited discontent everywhere alike,
which provoked the Wilkes agitation in England at
the same time as the colonial agitation beyond the
Atlantic. But the malecontents in England had no
such simple remedy as lay at the command of the
malecontents of Massachusetts and Virginia. They
could not repudiate the Government which roused
their sense of injury.

It was not then simply because they were colonies
N

178 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

that our colonies rebelled. It was because they were
• colonies under the old colonial system, and at a moment
when that system itself was administered in an unusu-
ally narrow-minded and pedantic way. But I observe
next that any general inference drawn from the con-
duct of these colonies is open to objection, because
they were not normal but very peculiar colonies.

The modern idea of a colony is that it is a com-
munity formed by the overflow of another community.
Overcrowding and poverty in one country causes, we
think, emigration to another country which is emptier
and richer. I have explained that this was not the
nature of our American colonies. England^ on the
one hand was then not overcrowded. On the other
hand the eastern coast of North America, where the
colonies were settled, was not specially attractive by
its wealth. It was no Eldorado, no Potosi, and in
the northern part it was even poor. Why then did
colonists settle in it? They had one predominant
motive, and it was the same which Moses alleged to
Pharaoh for the Exodus of the Israelites. "We
must go seven days' journey into the wilderness to
offer a sacrifice unto the Lord our God." Eeligion
impelled them. They wished to live on beliefs
and to practise rites which were not tolerated in
England. This indeed was not the case everywhere
alike. Virginia of course was Anglican. But the
New England colonies were Puritan, Pennsylvania
was Quaker, Maryland was Catholic, while of South

1 Compare the chapter in Adam Smith : Of the motives for
establishing new colonies.

VIII SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN 179

Carolina we read ^ that " the Churchmen were not a
third part of the inhabitants," and that "many
various opinions had been taught by a multitude of
teachers and expounders of all sorts and persuasions."
Thus the old emigration was a real exodus — that is, it
was a religious emigration. Now this makes all the
difference. The emigrant who goes out merely to
make his fortune may possibly in time forget his
native land ; but he is not likely to do so ; absence
endears it to him, distance idealises it ; he desires to
return to it when his money is made, he would gladly
be buried in it. There is scarcely more than one
thing that can break this spell, and that is religion.
Eeligion indeed may turn emigration into exodus.
Those who leave Troy carrying their gods with them
can resist no doubt the yearning that draws them
back ; they can build with confidence their Lavinium
or their Alba, or even their Rome, in the new territory
imhallowed before. For I always hold that religion
is the great state-building principle; these colonists
could create a new state because they were already a
church, since the church, so at least I hold, is the
soul of the state ; where there is a church a state
grows up in time ; but if you find a state which is
not also in some sense a church, you find a state
which is not long for this world.

Now in this respect the American colonies were

very peculiar. How is it possible to draw from their

history any conclusion about colonies in general 1 In

particular how can you argue from their case to the

» HUdretb, u. p. 232.

180 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect,

case of our present colonies which have grown up
since 1 In those colonies there was from the outset a
spirit driving them to separation from England, a
principle attracting them and conglobing them into a
new union among themselves, I have remarked how
early this spirit showed itself in the New England
colonies. No doubt it was not present in all. It
was not present in Virginia, but Avhen the colonial
discontents, heated by the pedantry of Grenville and
Lord North, burst into a flame, then was the moment
when Virginia went over to New England, and the
spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers found the power to turn
offended colonists into a new nation.

But what is to be found similar to this in our
present colonies 1 They have not sprung out of any
religious exodus. Their founders carried no gods
with them. On the contrary they go out into the
wilderness of mere materialism, into territories where
as yet there is nothing consecrated, nothing ideal.
Where can their gods be but at home ? If they in
such circumstances can find within them the courage
to stand out as state-builders, — if they can have the
heart to sever themselves from English history, from
all traditions and memories of the island where their
fathers lived for a thousand years, — it will indeed be
necessary to think that England is a name which
possesses sadly little attractive power.

I think then that we mistake the moral of the
American Revolution, when we infer from it that all
colonies — and not merely colonies of religious refugees
under a bad colonial system — fall off from the tree as

VIII SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN 181

soon as they ripen. And in like manner perhaps we
draw a wrong inference, and omit to draw the right
inference, from the prosperity which the United
States have enjoyed since the secession. I suppose
there has never been in any community so much
happiness, or happiness of a kind so little demoralis-
ing, as in the United States. But the causes of this
happiness are not political. They lie rooted much
deeper than the political institutions of the country.
If a philosopher were asked for a recipe to produce
the greatest amount of pure happiness in a community
he would say. Take a number of men whose char-
acters have been formed during many generations by
rational liberty, serious religion, and strenuous labour.
Place these men in a wide territory, where no painful
pressure shall reach them, and where prosperity shall
be within the reach of alL Adversity gives wisdom
and strength, but with pain; prosperity gives pleasure,
but relaxes the character. Adversity followed after a
time by prosperity, — this is the recipe for healthy
happiness, for it gives pleasure without speedily
relaxing energy. And it is a better recipe still if the
prosperity at last given shall not be given too easily
and unconditionally. Now these are the conditions
which have produced American happiness. Characters
formed in a temperate zone, by Teutonic liberty and
Protestant religion ; prosperity conferred freely but
in measure, and on the condition not only of labour
but of the use of intelligence and ingenuity.

This recipe will produce happiness, but only for a
time, only as long as the population bears a low

182 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

proportion to the extent of territory. For a long
time it was supposed that America had some magic
secret by which she avoided all the evils of Europe.
The secret was simple ; prosperous conditions of life
and strong characters. Of late years the Americans
themselves have awakened from the dream that their
country is never to be soiled with the crimes and
follies of Europe. They have no enemies, but yet
they have had a war on a scale as gigantic as their
territory, which Mr. Wells reckons to have cost in
four years a million lives and nearly two thousand
millions of pounds sterling ; they have not kings, and
yet we know that they have had regicide. Neverthe-
less the reputation and the greatness of the United
States stand now perhaps higher than ever. But
insensibly their pretensions have changed their char-
acter. Now it is said that no state was ever so
powerful, that it is or will be the dominating state of
the world ; in other words it is classed among other
states, but at the head of them. Its pretension used
to be wholly different. It used to claim to be unique
in kind; to be a visible proof that the states of
Europe with their vaunts of power, their haughty
Governments, their wars and their debts, were on the
wrong road altogether; that happiness and virtue
hold a more modest path ; and that the best lot for a
state is not to be great in history, but rather to have
no history at all.

American happiness then is in no great degree
the consequence of secession. But does she owe
to secession her immense greatness 1

vni SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN 183

When we look back over the stages of her progress
we are able easily to discover that she has been
in several points remarkably favoured by fortune.
Imagine for instance that the original colonies, instead
of lying in a compact group along the coast, had been
scattered over the Continent, and had been separated
from one another by other settlements belonging to
other European states. Such a difference might have
made the growth of the Union impossible. Imagine
again that the French colony of Louisiana, instead
of failing miserably, had advanced steadily in the
hundred years between its foundation and the Ameri-
can Revolution. This colony embraced the valley of
the Mississippi. Had it been successful it might
easily have grown into a great French state, held
together through its whole length by its immense
river. Or again suppose it had passed into the
hands of England ! It was Napoleon who, by selling
Louisiana to the United States, made it possible for
the Union to develop into the gigantic Power we see.

Still it is evident that the United States has found
the solution of that great problem of expansion on a
vast scale, which we have seen all the five Western
nations of Europe in succession failing to solve. We
saw them starting with the notion of an indefinite
extension of the state, but we saw them almost in a^
moment lose their hold of this conception and take
up instead an extremely opposite conception, out of
which grew the old colonial system. We saw them
treat their colonies as public estates, of which the
profits were to be secured to the population of the

184 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.

mother-country. We saw at the same time that this
system could never be represented as anything but a
makeshift, so that under it there always lurked the
despair of any permanent possession of colonies. We
saw, from this cause and from others, Empire after
Empire in the NeAv World dissolve. Our own first
Empire was among these. But we have since come
into possession of a new one. In the management of
this we have been careful enough to avoid the old
error. The old colonial system is gone. But in
place of it no clear and reasoned system has been
adopted. The wrong theory is given up, but what is
the right theory ? There is only one alternative. If
the colonies are not, in the old phrase, possessions of
England, then they must be a part of England ; and
we must adopt this view in earnest. We must cease
altogether to say that England is an island ofi" the
north-western coast of Europe, that it has an area of
120,000 square miles and a population of thirty odd
millions. We must cease to think that emigrants,
when they go to colonies, leave England or are lost
to England. We must cease to think that the history
of England is the history of the Parliament that sits at
Westminster, and that afi"airs which are not discussed
there cannot belong to English history. When we
have accustomed ourselves to contemplate the whole
Empire together and call it all England, we shall see
that here too is a United States. Here too is a
great homogeneous people, one in blood, language,
religion and laws, but dispersed over a boundless
space. We shall see that, though it is held together

VIII SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN 185

by strong moral ties, it has little that can be called a
constitution, no system that seems capable of resisting
any severe shock. But if we are disposed to doubt
whether any system can be de\dsed capable of holding
together communities so distant from each other,
then is the time to recollect the history of the
United States of America. For they have such a
system. They have solved this problem. They have
shown that in the present age of the world political
unions may exist on a vaster scale than was possible
in former times. No doubt our problem has diffi-
culties of its own, immense difficulties. But the
greatest of these difficulties is one which we make
ourselves. It is the false preconception which we
bring to the question, that the problem is insoluble,
that no such thing ever was done or ever will be
done; it is our misinterpretation of the American
Revolution.

From that Revolution we infer that all distant
colonies, sooner or later, secede from the mother-
country. We ought to infer only that they secede
when they are held iinder the old colonial system.

We infer that population overflowing from a country
into countries on the other side of an ocean must
needs break the tie that binds them to their original
home, acquire new interests, and make the nucleus of
a new State. We ought to infer only that refugees,
driven across the ocean by religious exclusiveness and
carrying with them strong religious ideas of a peculiar
type, may make the nucleus of a new state. This
remark is confirmed in an unexpected manner by the

186 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LBOT. vill

history of the secession of Southern and Central
America from Spain and Portugal. Here, to be sure,
there was Catholicism on both sides of the ocean ; but
Gervinus remarks that in reality the religion of those
regions was Jesuitism, and that accordingly the
suppression of the Jesuits gave a moral shock to the
population which he reckons among the leading causes
of disruption.

Lastly, we infer from the greatness of the United
States since their secession that the division of states,
when they become overlargc, is expedient. But the
greatness of the United States is the best proof that
a state may become immensely krge and yet prosper.
The Union is the great example of a system under
which an indefinite number of provinces is firmly
held together without any of the inconveniences
which have been felt in our Empire. It is therefore
the visible proof that those inconveniences are not
inseparable from a large Empire, but only from the
old colonial system.

But the expansion of England has been twofold.
Hitherto we have considered only the expansion of
the English nation and state together by means of
colonies. What are we to think of that other and
much stranger expansion by which India with its
vast population has passed under the rule of English-
men?

SECOND COUESE

LECTURE I

HISTORY AND POLITICS

Historians are sometimes ridiculed for indulging
in conjectures about what would have followed in
history if some one event had fallen out diflferently.
" So gloriously unpractical ! " we exclaim. Now it is
not for the sake of practice, but for the sake of
theory, that such conjectures are hazarded, and I
think historians should deal in them much more than
they do. It is an illusion to suppose that great
public events, because they are on a grander scale,
have something more fatally necessary about them
than ordinary private events ; and this illusion
enslaves the judgment. To form any opinion or
estimate of a great national policy is impossible so
long as you refuse even to imagine any other policy
pursued. This remark is especially applicable to an
event so vast and complex as the Expansion of
England. Think for a moment, if there had been no
connection of England with the New World ! How
utterly different would have been the whole course

190 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

of English history since the reign of Queen Elizabeth !
No Spanish Armada would have come against us,
and there would have been no Drake and Hawkins to
withstand it. No great English navy would have
grown up. Blake would not have fought with Van
Tromp and De Ruyter. The wars of the Long
Parliament and Charles II. with Holland, the war of
CromweU with Spain, would never have taken place.
The country would not have amassed the capital
which enabled it to withstand and at last to humble
Louis XIV. The great commercial corporations
would not have arisen to balance the landed interest
and transform the policy of the state. England
would not have stood at the head of all nations in
Queen Anne's reign, and we should have had a wholly
and entirely different eighteenth century. Every-
thing in short would be utterly unlike what it is;
and you may be tempted to ridicule the whole
speculation as unprofitable, because infinite.

But yet it is the most practical of all speculations,
and for this reason. All this vast expansion, all
these prodigious accretions which have gathered
round the original England in three centuries, are
yet not so completely incorporate with England that
we cannot contemplate shaking ourselves free from
them and becoming again the plain England of Queen
Elizabeth. The growth of our Empire may indeed
have been in a certain sense natural ; Greater Britain,
compared to old England, may seem but the full-
grown giant developed out of the sturdy boy; but
there is this difference, that the grown man does not

t • HISTOKY AND POLITICS 191

and cannot think of becoming a boy again, whereas
England both can and does consider the expediency
of emancipating her colonies and abandoning India.
We do not, as a matter of fact, think of Canada as
we think of Kent, nor of Nova Scotia as of Scotland,
nor of New South Wales as of Wales, nor of India
as of Ireland. We can most easily conceive them
separated from us, and, if we chose, we could most
easily bring about the separation. Nay more, many
authorities actually recommend us to do so. We are
forced then to pass some judgment on the expansion
of England considered as a whole. Is it a transient
development, like the expansion of Spain ? Was it
even a mistake from the beginning, a product of mis-
directed energy ? Nations can and do make mistakes.
They are guided often by blind passion or instinct,
and there is no reason in the nature of things why
their aberrations should not continue for ages and
lead them infinitely far. And thus it is conceivable
that England ought from the beginning to have
resisted the temptations of the New World, that she
ought to have remained the self-contained island she
was in Shakspeare's time — " in a great pool a swan's
nest " ; or at least that it would have been fortunate
for her to have lost her Empire as France did, or
when she lost her first colonial Empire not to have
founded a new one.

But if this be so, or even if it may be so, what an
enormous, intricate, and at the same time what a
momentous problem is before us ! If we have thus
wandered from the right path, or if only we ought

192 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

now to strike into a wholly new path, how prodigi-
ously important is the fact ! How much it siu-passes
in importance all those questions of home politics
which absorb our attention so much ! Many of us
elude this consideration by a very confused argument.
We say, "Let us mind our own affairs and not
concern ourselves with remote countries, which are
beyond our comprehension, and which it was a mis-
fortune for us ever to become connected with." But
if this really was a misfortune, if our empire really
is so much too large for us, then the question is
infinitely more urgent and instant than if it were
otherwise. For then we cannot too soon resolve to
free ourselves from an encumbrance which will
assuredly entail disaster upon us; then we ought
to devote ourselves to the vast and delicate problem
of destroying our Empire, until it is fairly achieved.
And thus in any case we have here by far the largest
of all political questions, for if our Empire is capable
of further development, we have the problem of
discovering what direction that development should
take, and if it is a mischievous encumbrance, we
have the still more anxious problem of getting rid of
it, and in either case we deal with territories so vast
and populations which grow so rapidly that their
destinies are infinitely important.

I say, this is a political problem, but is it not also
a historical problem? Yes, and the main reason
why I have chosen this subject is that it illustrates
better than any other subject my view of the con-
nection between history and politics. The ultimate

I HISTORY AND POLITICS 193

object of all my teaching here is to establish this
fundamental connection, to show that politics and
history are only different aspects of the same study.
There is a vulgar view of politics which sinks them
into a mere struggle of interests and parties, and
there is a foppish kind of history which aims only
at literary display, which produces delightful books
hovering between poetry and prose. These perver-
sions, according to me, come from an unnatural
divorce between two subjects which belong to each
other. Politics are vulgar when they are not
liberalised by history, and history fades into mere
literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical
politics. In order to show this clearly, it has seemed
to me a good plan to select a topic which belongs
most evidently to history and to politics at once.
Such a topic pre-eminently is Greater Britain. What
can be more plainly political than the questions
What ought to be done with India ? What ought to
be done with our Colonies 1 But they are questions
which need the aid of history. We cannot delude
ourselves here, as we do in home questions of fran-
chise or taxation, so as to fancy that common sense
or common morality will suffice to lead us to a true
opinion. We cannot suppose ourselves able to form
a judgment, for example, about Indian affairs without
some special study^ because we cannot help seeing
that the races of India are far removed from ourselves
in all physical, intellectual, and moral conditions.
Here then we see how politics merge into history.
But I am even more anxious to show you by this
o

194 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.

example how history merges into politics. The
foundation of this Empire of ours is a comparatively
modern event. If we leave out of account the
colonies we have lost and think only of the Empire
we still possess, we think of an Empire which was
founded almost entirely in the reigns of George II. .
and George III. Now this is the period which
students avoid as being too modern for study ; this
is the period which classic historians neglect, and
which accordingly passes in the popular mind for an
uneventful period of uniform prosperity and civilis-
ation. I have complained that our historians all
grow languid as they approach this period, that
their descriptions of it are featureless, and that
accordingly they lead their readers to think of
English history as leading up to nothing, as a story
without a moral, or as like the Heart of Midlothian,
of which the whole last volume is dull and superfluous.
You see then how I think this evil may be cured. I
show you mighty events in the future, events of
which, as future, we know as yet nothing but that
they must come, and that they must be mighty.
These events are some further development in the
relation of England to her colonies and also in her
relation to India. Some further development, I say,
for evidently the present phase is not definitive ; but
what the development will be we cannot yet know.
Will there be a great disruption ? Will Canada and
Australia become independent States? Shall we
abandon India, and will some native Government at
present almost inconceivable take the place of the

I HISTOKY AND POLITICS 195

Viceroy and his Council ? Or will the opposite of all
this happen 1 Will Greater Britain rise to a higher
form of organisation 1 Will the English race, which
is divided by so many oceans, making a full use of
modern scientific inventions, devise some organisation
like that of the United States, under which full
liberty and solid union may be reconciled with
unbounded territorial extension? And, secondly,
shall we succeed in solving a still harder problem?
Shall we discover some satisfactory way of governing
India, some modus vivendi for two such extreme
opposites as a ruling race of Englishmen in a country
which they cannot colonise, and a vast population
of Asiatics with immemorial Asiatic traditions and
ways of life ? We do not know, I say, how these
problems will be solved, but we may be certain that
they will be solved somehow, and we may be certain
from the nature of the problems that the solution of
them will be infinitely momentous. This then is
the goal towards which England is travelling. We
are not then to think, as most historians seem to do,
that all development has ceased in English history,
and that we have arrived at a permanent condition
of security and prosperity. Not at all ; the move-
ment may be less perceptible because it is on a much
larger scale; but the changes and the struggles
when they come — and they will come — will be on a
larger scale also. And when the crisis arrives, it
will throw a wonderful light back upon our past
history. All that amazing expansion which has
taken place since the reign of George II., and which

196 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

we read of with a kind of bewildered astonishment,
will begin then to impress us differently. At present
when we look at the boundless extent of Canada and
Australia given up to our race, we are astonished,
but form no definite opinion. When we read of the
conquest of India, two hundred millions of Asiatics
conquered by an English trading company, we are
astonished and admire, but we form no definite
opinion. All seems so strange and anomalous that
it almost ceases to be interesting. We do not know
how to judge of it nor what to think of it. It will
be otherwise then. Time will reveal what was really
solid in all this success, and what was not so. We
shall know what to think of that great struggle of
the eighteenth century for the possession of the New
World, when the event has shown, either that a
great and solid World-State has been produced, or
that an ephemeral trade-empire, like that of old
Spain, rose to fall again; either that a solid union
between the West and East, fruitful in the greatest
and profoundest results, was effected in India, or
that Clive and Hastings set on foot a monstrous
enterprise which, after a century of apparent success,
ended in failure.

This lesson time will teach to all alike. But
history ought surely in some degree, if it is worth
anything, to anticipate the lessons of time. We
shall all no doubt be wise after the event ; we study
history that we may be wise before the event. Why
should we not now form an opinion about the destiny
of our colonies and of our Indian Empire? That

I HISTOKY AND POLITICS 197

destiny, we may be sure, will not be decreed
arbitrarily. It will be the result of the working
of those laws which it is the object of political
science to discover. When the event takes place,
this will be visible enough ; all will see more or
less clearly that what has happened could not but
happen. But if so, the students of political science
ought to be able to foresee, at least in outline, the
event while it is still future.

Now, do not these considerations set the more
recent history of England in a new light? I have
shown you England in the latter part of the sixteenth
century entering upon a wholly new path. I have
traced the stages of its progress in this path through
the seventeenth century and the prodigious results
which followed in the eighteenth. I have pointed
out that we are still in a state of things which is
evidently provisional, of which some great modifica-
tion is evidently at hand. It follows from all this
that the modern part of English history presents to
us a great problem, one of the greatest problems, in
political science. And thus I show you history
merging in politics. I show you the reigns of George
11. and George III. not as a mere bygone period,
whose quaint manners and fashions it is a delightful
amusement to revive with the imagination, but as a
storehouse of the materials by which we are to solve
the greatest and most urgent of all political problems.
In order to understand what is to become of our
Empire we must study its nature, the causes which
support it, the roots by which its Life is fed ; and to

198 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

study its nature is to study its history, and especially
the history of its beginning.

We have been told for a long time past by fashion-
able writers that history has made itself too solemn
and pompous, that it ought to deal in minute, familiar,
vivid details ; in fact that it ought to be written just
in the style of a novel. I will pause once more to
tell you what I think of this view, which has been
of late so prevalent. I do not deny the criticism on
which it is founded. I fully admit that history
should not be solemn and pompous, and I admit that
for a long time it was both. But solemnity is one
thing, and seriousness is quite another. This school
argue that because history should not be solemn,
therefore it should not be serious. They deny that
history can establish any solid or important truths ;
they have no conception that any great discoveries
can ever come out of it. They can only see that it is
exquisitely entertaining and delightful to call the
past into life again, to see our ancestors in their
costume as they lived, and to surprise them in the
very act of doing their famous deeds. I find their
theory stated with the most ingenuous frankness by
Thackeray in the opening to his lecture on Steele, a
passage which almost every one has read, and I fancy
almost every one has thought very shrewd and true.
He says, " What do we look for in studying the
history of a past agel Is it to learn the political
transactions and characters of the leading public
men 1 is it to make ourselves acquainted with the life
and being of the time? If we set out with the

t HISTORY AND POLITICS 199

former grave pui'pose, where is the truth, and who
believes that he has it entire 1 " And then he goes on
to declare that in his opinion the solemn statements
which we find in books of history about public affairs
are all nonsense, and would not bear any sceptical
examination. He refers by way of example to
Swift's Conduct of the Allies and Coxe's Life of
Marllorough, and you see that it is from works of
that extremely old-fashioned cast that he has formed
his idea of what history is. But now, political
history being all nonsense, what are we to substitute
for it '(

Thackeray tells us that we are " to make ourselves
acquainted with the life and being of the time."
What does this mean 1 He goes on to explain. " As
we read in these dehghtful volumes of the Taller
and Spectator, the past age returns, the England of
our ancestors is revivified. The Maypole rises in the
Strand again in London, the churches are thronged
with daily worshippers ; the beaux are gathering in
the cofifee-houses, the gentry are going to the drawing-
room, the ladies are thronging to the toy-shops, the
chairmen are jostling in the streets, the footmen are
running with links before the chariots or fighting
round the theatre doors. I say the fiction carries a
greater amount of truth in solution than the volume
which purports to be all true. Out of the fictitious
book I get the expression of the life of the time ;
of the manners, of the movement, the dress, the
pleasures, the laughter, the ridicules of society — the
old times live again and I travel in the old country

200 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.

of England. Can the heaviest historian do more for
me?"

That a great' novelist should think thus is in
itself almost a matter of course. The great engineer
Brindley, being asked for what purpose he supposed
rivers to have been created, answered without the
least hesitation, To feed canals ! Thackeray, being
asked why Queen Anne lived and the English under
the Duke of Marlborough fought the French, answers
candidly, It was that I might write my delightful
novel of Esmond. Of course he thought so, but how
could he, with his keen sense of humour, venture to
say so ? You see, he appeals to our scepticism, He
does not deny that history might be important if
it were true, but he says it is not true. He does
not believe a word of it.

Well! if so, Avhat should we do? Must we take
the course he points out to us? Must we give up
history as a serious study but keep it as a delightful
amusement, turn away from European wars and
watch the ladies thronging to the toy-shops, cease
studying what sort of government our ancestors had
and inquire rather what they had for dinner 1 I tell
you there is another and a much better course, which
leads in quite the opposite direction. If history for a
long time has been, as it has been, untrue and un-
satisfactory, correct it, amend it. Make it true and
trustworthy. There is no reason in the world why
this should not be done, or rather it has been done
already for the greater part of history, and only
remains undone in those more recent periods which

I HISTORY AND POLITICS 201

students have neglected. It seems not to be generally
known how much the study of history has been
transformed of late years. Those charges of untrust-
worthiness, of pompous and hollow conventionality,
which are vulgarly made against history, used to be
well-grounded once, but are in the main groundless
now. History has been in great part rewritten ; in
great part it is now true, and lies before science as a
mass of materials out of which a political doctrine
may be deduced. It is not now pompous and solemn,
but it is thoroughly serious, much more serious than
ever. Here then is the alternative which lies before
you. Instead of ceasing to regard history seriously,
aa Thackeray advises you, regard it more seriously
than before. Instead of holding that you cannot
find the truth, and therefore may as well cease to seek
it, consider that the truth is hard to find, and there-
fore must be sought all the more diligently, all the
more laboriously.

For observe that if once we grant that historic
truth is attainable, and attainable it is, then there
can be no further dispute about its supreme im-
portance. It deals with facts of the largest and most
momentous kind, with the causes of the decay and
growth of Empires, with war and peace, with the
sufferings or happiness of millions. It is by this con-
sideration that I merge history in politics. I tell
you that when you study English history you study
not the past of England only, but her future. It is
the welfare of your country, it is your whole interest
as citizens, that is in question while you study

202 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

history. How it is so I illustrate by putting before
you this subject of the Expansion of England. I
show you that there is a vast question ripening for
decision, upon which almost the whole future of our
country depends. In magnitude this question far sur-
passes all other questions which you can ever have
to discuss in political life. And yet it is altogether
a historical question. The investigation of it requires
not only some knowledge, but I may almost say a
full knowledge of the modern history of England.
For, as I have pointed out, England has been entirely
engaged for the last three centuries in this expansion
into Greater Britain. If therefore you would discern
in outline the future of Greater Britain, you will have
to master almost the whole history of England in the
last three centuries. Only enter upon these inquiries,
only undertake to make up your minds upon the
colonial question and the Indian question ; you will
find that you are led back from question to question
and from one department of affairs to another, iintil
you discover that these two questions bring the whole
modern history of England in their train. And not
only is this one way of grasping English history,
but it is the best way. For in history everything
depends upon turning narrative into problems. So
long as you think of history as a mere chronological
narrative, so long you are in the old literary groove
which leads to no trustworthy knowledge, but only
to that pompous conventional romancing of which
all serious men are tired. Break the drowsy spell
of narrative; ask yourself questions; set yourself

T HISTORY AND POLITICS 203

problems ; your mind will at once take up a new
attitude ; you will become an investigator ; you will
cease to be solemn and begin to be serious. Now
modern English history breaks up into two grand
problems, the problem of the colonies and the
problem of India.

Moreover, all those considerations which make the
universal study of history imperative in all countries
where there is popular government, operate in
England far more strongly than in any other
country. For this immense expansion of our race
has the effect of making English politics most
bewilderingly difficult. I take it that every other
country — France, Germany, the United States, every
country except perhaps Eussia — has a simple problem
to solve compared with that which is set before
England. Most of those states are compact and
solid, scarcely less compact, though so much larger,
than the city-states of antiquity. They can only be
attacked at home, and therefore their armies are a kind
of citizen soldiery. Now, distant dependencies destroy
this compactness, and make the national interest
hard to discern and hard to protect Because of our
scattered colonies it is easy for an enemy to strike at
us. If we were at war with the United States, we
should feel it in Canada ; if with Russia, in Afghan-
istan. But this external difficulty is less serious than
the internal difficulties which arise in a scattered
empire. How to give a moral unity to vast countries
separated from each other by half the globe, even
when they are inhabited in the main by one nation !

204 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lrct.

But even this is not the greatest of the anxieties of
England. For besides the colonies, we have India.
Here at least there is no community of race or
of religion. Here that solid basis which is formed
by immigration and colonisation is almost entirely
wanting. Here you have another problem not less
vast, not less difficult, and much less hopeful, than
that of the colonies. Either problem by itself is as
much as any nation ever took in hand before. It
seems really too much that both should fall on the
same nation at the same time.

Consider how distracting must be the effect upon
the public mind of these two opposite questions. The
colonies and India are in opposite extremes. What-
ever political maxims are most applicable to the one,
are most inapplicable to the other. In the colonies
everything is brand-new. There you have the most
progressive race put in the circumstances most favour-
able to progress. There you have no past and an
unbounded future. Government and institutions
are all ultra-English. All is liberty, industry, in-
vention, innovation, and as yet tranquillity. Now if
this alone were Greater Britain, it would be homo-
geneous, all of a piece ; and, vast and boundless as
the territory is, we might come to understand its
affairs. But there is at the same time another
Greater Britain, surpassing this in population though
not in territory, and it is everything which this is
not. India is all past and, I may almost say, has no
future. What it will come to the wisest man is
afraid' to conjecture, but in the past it opens vistas

r HISTORY AND POLITICS 205

into a fabulous antiquity. All the oldest religions,
all the oldest customs, petrified as it were. No form
of popular government as yet possible. Everything
which Europe, and still more the New World, has
outlived still flourishing in full vigour ; superstition,
fatalism, polygamy, the most primitive priestcraft, the
most primitive despotism; and threatening the northern
frontier the vast Asiatic steppe with its Osbegs and Tur-
comans. Thus the same nation which reaches one
hand towards the future of the globe and assumes the
position of mediator between Europe and the New
World, stretches the other hand towards the remotest
past, becomes an Asiatic conqueror, and usurps the
succession of the Great Mogul.

How can the same nation pursue two lines of
policy so radically different without bewilderment, be
despotic in Asia and democratic in Australia, be in
the East at once the greatest Mussulman Power in
the world and the guardian of the property of
thousands of idol-temples, and at the same time in
the West be the foremost champion of free thought
and spiritual religion, stand out as a great military
Imperialism to resist the march of Russia in Central
Asia at the same time that it fills Queensland and
Manitoba with free settlers? Never certainly did
any nation, since the world began, assume anything
like so much responsibility. Never did so many
vast questions in all parts of the globe, questions
calling for all sorts of special knowledge and special
training, depend upon the decision of a single public.
It must be confessed that this public bears its respon-

206 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect. i

sibility lightly ! It does not even study colonial and
Indian questions. It does not consider them in-
teresting, except in those rare cases when they come
to the foreground of politics. When the fate of a
Ministry is concerned they are found intensely
interesting, but the public does not consider them
interesting so long as only the population of India,
the destiny of a vast section of the planet, and the
future of the English state itself, are concerned. As
to India, Macaulay writes thus : " It might have
been expected that every Englishman who takes any
interest in any part of history would be anxious to
know how a handful of his countrymen, separated
from their home by an immense ocean, subjugated in
the course of a few years one of the greatest empires
in the world. Yet unless we greatly err, this subject
is to most readers not only insipid but positively
distasteful."

The acquisition of India by England, as part of
that expansion which in the last two centimes has so
profoundly modified our state, will be examined in
the succeeding lectures.

LECTURE II

THE INDIAN EMPIRE

As formerly the Colonial Empire, so now the Indian
Empire is to be considered only so far as it illustrates
the general law of expansion which prevails in the
modern part of English history. It will be considered
not in itself, but only in its relation to our own
state. It will be considered historically — that is, in
the causes which produced it ; but also politically — •
that is, in regard to its value or stability.

From this point of view we shall not find it
convenient to observe chronological order. Our
acquisition of India was made blindl3\ Nothing
great that has ever been done by Englishmen was
done so unintentionally, so accidentally, as the conquest
of India. There has indeed been little enough of
calculation or contrivance in our colonisation. When
our first settlers went out to Virginia and New
England, it was not intended to lay the foundations of
a mighty republican state. But here the event has
differed from the design only in degree. We did

208 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

intend to establish a new community, and we even
knew that it would be republican in its tendency ;
what was hidden from us was only its immense
magnitude. But in India we meant one thing, and
did quite another. Our object was trade, and in this
we were not particularly successful War with the
native states we did not think of at all till a
hundred years after our first settlement, and then
we thought only of such war as might support our
trade; after this time again more than half a cen-
tury passed before we thought of any considerable
territorial acquisitions; the nineteenth century had
almost begun before the policy of acquiring an
ascendency over the native states was entered upon ;
and our present supreme position cannot be said to
have been attained before the Governor-Generalship
of Lord Dalhousie little more than a quarter of a
century ago. All along we have been looking one
way and moving another. In a case like this the
chronological method of study is the worst that can be
chosen. If we were to trace the history of the East
India Company from year to year, carefully putting
ourselves at the point of view of the Directors, we
should be doing all in our power to blind ourselves.
For it has not been the will of the Directors, but
other forces overruling their will, forces against
which they struggled in vain, by which the Indian
Empire has been brought into existence. For this
reason it is almost necessary, as for other reasons it
is convenient, to begin at the other end, and before
considering how the Empire grew to its preseut

11 THE INDIAN EMPIRE 209

greatness to inquire what at the present moment it
actually is.

We call this Empire a conquest, in order to mark
the fact that it was not acquired in any degree by
settlement or colonisation, but by a series of wars
ending in cessions of territory by the native Powers
to the East India Company. But let us be careful
how we take for granted that it is a conquest in any
more precise sense of the word.

Above I criticised the term "possessions of
England," which is so commonly applied to the
colonies. I asked, if by England be meant the people
inhabiting England and by the colonies certain
English people living beyond the sea, in what sense
can one of these populations be said to belong to the
other? Or if by England you mean the English
Government, which is also ultimately the Govern-
ment of the colonies, Avhy should we speak of the
subjects of a Government as its possession or pro-
perty, unless indeed they became its subjects by
conquest 1 Now this criticism does not directly apply
to India, because India did come under the Queen's
government by conquest. India therefore may be
called a possession of England in a sense which is not
applicable to the colonies. Nevertheless the word con-
quest, which, like most of the vocabulary of war, has
come down to us from primitive barbaric times, may
easily be misunderstood. We may still ask in what
sense England am be said to possess India. What
we possess we do vote in some manner to our own
enjoyment. If I own land, I either take the profits
?

^10 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lkct.

of the harvest, or, if I let the land to a farmer, I get
rent from it. And in primitive times the conquest
of a country was usually followed by possession in
some literal sense. Sometimes the conquerors actu-
ally became landlords of the conquered territory or
of part of it, as in that conquest of Palestine which
we read of in the Book of Joshua, or in those Roman
conquests where a certain extent of confiscated land
was often granted out to a number of Roman citizens.
Now assuredly India is not a conquered country in
this sense. England has not seized lands in India,
and after displacing the native proprietors assigned
them to Englishmen.

There is another sense in which we may conceive
the condition of a conquered country. We may
think of it as tributary or paying tribute. Only we
must be careful how we understand the expression.
If it merely means that the people pay a tax, — in other
words, that they meet the expense of their own govern-
ment or of the army that protects their frontier, — there
is nothing in this peculiar to a conquered people.
Almost every people in some form or other pays
the expense of its own government. If the word
" tributary " is to be equivalent to " conquered " or
" dependent " it must mean paying something over
and above the expense of its government. We have
an example of such a tribute in modern Egypt. The
government of Egypt is in the hands of a Khedive
who pays himself handsomely out of the pockets of
the people ; but Egypt is tributary to the Sultan of
Turkey, — that is, it pays to him a sum which does not

II THE INDIAN EMPIRE 211

in any shape return to the country, but simply marks
its relation of dependence upon the Sultan.

Such a tribute as this would mark that the country
which paid it was a possession of the country which
received it, because it seems analogous to the rent
which a tenant farmer pays to the landowner. Is
India then tributary in this sense to England?
Certainly not, at least not directly or avowedly.
Taxes are raised of course in India, as taxes are
raised in England, but India is no more tributary
than England itself. The money drawn from India
is spent upon the government of India, and no money
is levied beyond what is supposed to be necessary for
this purpose.

Of course it may be and often has been argued
that India is in many ways sacrificed to England, and
in particular that money is under colourable pretexts
extorted from her. I am not now concerned with this
question, because I am inquiring simply what is the
relation established by law between India and
England, and not how far that relation may by
abuse have been perverted. India then is not a pos-
session of England in the sense of being legally tribu-
tary to England, any more than any of our colonies
are so.

The truth is that, though the present relation
between India and England was historically created
by war, yet England does not, at least openly, claim
any rights over India in virtue of this fact. In the
Queen's proclamation of 1st November 1858, by
which the open assumption of the government by the

212 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

Queen was announced, occur the express words, " We
hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian
territories by the same obligations of duty which bind
us to all our other subjects." That is, conquest
confers no peculiar rights, or India is not for practical
purposes a conquered country.

In fact, though the advance of civilisation has not
as yet abolished wars nor even perhaps diminished
the frequency of them, yet it has very much trans-
formed their character. Conquest is nominally still
possible, but the word has changed its meaning. It
does not now mean spoliation or the acquisition of
any oppressive lordship, so that the temptation to
make conquests is now very much diminished. Thus
our possession of India imposes upon us vast and
almost intolerable responsibilities ; this is evident ;
but it is not at once evident that we reap any benefit
from it.

We must therefore dismiss from our minds the
idea that India is in any practical sense of the word
a possession of England. In ordinary language the
two notions of property and government are mixed
up in a way that produces infinite confusion. When
we speak of India as " our magnificent dependency "
or " the brightest jewel in the English diadem, " we
use metaphors which have come down to us from
primitive ages and from a state of society which has
long passed away. India does indeed depend on
England in the sense that England determines her
condition and her policy and that she is governed by
Englishmen, but not in the sense that she renders

n THE INDIAN EMPIEE 213

service to England or makes England directly richer
or more powerful. And thus with respect to India
as with respect to the colonies, the question confronts
us on the threshold of the subject, What is the use of
if? Why do we take the trouble and involve our-
selves in the anxiety and responsibility of governing
two hundred millions of people in Asia 1

Now in respect to the colonies I argued that this
question, however naturally it may suggest itself, is
perverse, unless it can be shown that our colonies are
too remote either to give or receive any advantage
from their connection with us. For they are of our
own blood, a mere extension of the English nationality
into new lands. If these lands were contiguous to
England, it would seem a matter of course that the
English population as it increases should occupy
them, and evidently desirable that it should do so
without a political separation. As they are not
contiguous but remote, a certain difficulty arises, but
it is a difficulty which in these days of steam and
electricity does not seem insurmountable. Now you
see that this argument rests entirely upon the com-
munity of blood between England and her colonies.
It does not therefore apply to India. Two races
could scarcely be more alien from each other than the
English and the Hindus. Comparative philology has
indeed discovered one link that had never been
suspected before. The language of the prevalent race
of India is indeed of the same family as our own
language. But in every other respect there is extreme
alienation. Their traditions do not touch ours at any

214 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

point. Their religion is further removed, from our
own even than Mohammedanism.

Our colonies, as I pointed out, were in the main
planted in the emptier parts of the globe, so that
their population is for the most part either entirely
English or predominantly so. I pointed out that
this was not the case with the colonies of Spain in
Central and Southern America, where the Spanish
settlers lived in the midst of a larger population of
native Indians, whom they reduced to a kind of
serfdom. Here then are two kinds of dependency,
of which the one is much more closely cognate to the
mother-country than the other. But both are con-
nected by real ties of blood with the mother-country.
Now India belongs to neither class, because its
population has no tie of blood whatever with the
population of England. Even if colonies had gone
out from England to India, they must have continued
insignificant in comparison to the enormous native
population; but there have been no such colonies.
England is separated from India by one of the strong-
est barriers that nature could set up between the two
countries. Nature has made the colonisation of India
by Englishmen impossible by giving her a climate in
which, as a rule, English children cannot grow up.

And thus, while the connection of England with
her colonies is in the highest degree natural, her
connection with India seems at first sight at least to
be in the highest degree unnatural. There is no
natural tie whatever between the two countries. No
community of blood ; no community of religion, for

n THE INDIAN EMPIRE 215

we come as Christians into a population divided
betv/een Brahminism and Mohammedanism. And
lastly, no community of interest, except so much
as there must be between all countries, viz. the
interest that each has to receive the commodities of
the other. For otherwise what interest can England
and India have in common 1 The interests of England
lie in Europe and in the New World. India, so far
as so isolated a country can have foreign interests at
all, looks towards Afghanistan, Persia, and Central
Asia, countries with which, except through India, we
should scarcely ever have had any communication.

The English conquest of India has produced results
even more strange than the Spanish conquest of
America, though the circumstances of it were, I
think, considerably less astonishing and romantic.
Whether we think of it with satisfaction or not, it is
the most striking and remarkable incident in the
modern part of the history of England. In a history
of modern England it deserves a prominent place in
the main narrative, and not the mere digression or
occasional notice which our historians commonly
assign to it. But how important it is we shall not
see so long as we only consider its strangeness ; we
must also bear in mind its enormous magnitude.
Much has been written to show the immensity of the
task we have undertaken in India ; yet with surpris-
ingly little effect. Figures seem only to paralyse the
imagination when they pass a certain magnitude, and
thus, while in our domestic politics we grow the more
interested the larger the question at issue is shown to

216 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

be, we cease to be interested when our ' Empire with
its much vaster questions is brought before us. Point
out that this Indian Empire is something like what
the Roman Empire was at its greatest extension, and
that we are responsible for it; the only effect pro-
duced is a disinclination to attend to the subject. Can
we seriously justify this"? I fancy we are in some
degree misled by an impression that in the outlying
parts of the world large dimensions are a matter
of course and make no diflference. Thus if India is
large, Canada and Australia are still larger, and yet we
do not find that the affairs of Canada and Australia
require much of our attention. True, but we over-
look an important distinction. In Canada and
Australia the territory is vast, but the population
exceedingly small ; the country also is not merely
distant from us, as India is, but also distant from all
the great Powers with which we might possibly en-
gage in war. India really belongs to quite a different
category of countries. It is a country as populous
and in some large regions more populous than the
most thickly peopled part^of Europe. It is a country
in which we have over and over again had to wage
war on a grand scale. Thus in the second Mahratta
war of 1818 Lord Hastings brought into the field
more than a hundred thousand men. And, distant
as it may seem, it is by no means out of the range of
European politics. Thus throughout the eighteenth
century it was part of the chess-board on which
France and England played out their game of skill.
Again since about 1830 India, and India almost alone,

II THE INDIAN EMPIRE 217

has involved us in differences with Eussia, and given
us a most intimate interest in the solution of the
Eastern Question.

India therefore is rather to be compared to the
countries of Europe than to the outlying, thinly-
peopled countries of the New World. Let us then
contemplate a little the magnitude of this Empire,
and take some pains to realise it by comparing it to
other magnitudes with which we are familiar. Let
us think then of Europe without Eussia — that is, of
all that system of countries which a few centuries
ago formed almost the whole scene of civilised history,
all the European countries of the Eoman Empire
plus the whole of Germany, the Slavonic countries
which are outside Eussia, and the Scandinavian
countries. India may be roughly said to be about
equal both in area and population to all these coim-
tries taken together. This Empire, which we now
govern from Downing Street, and whose budget forms
the annual annoyance and despair of the House of
Commons, is considerably larger and more populous
than the Empire of Napoleon when it had reached
its utmost extent. And, as I have said already, it is
an Empire of the same kind, not some vast empty
region like the old Spanish Dominion in South
America, but a crowded territory with an ancient
civilisation, with languages, religions, philosophies
and literatures of its own.

I think perhaps it may assist conception if I split
up this immense total into parts. The reason, no
doubt, why the thought of all Europe together im-

218 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leci.

presses us so much, is that there passes before the
mind a series of six or seven great states which must
be added together to make up Europe. Our con-
ception of Europe is the sum of our conceptions of
England, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and
Greece. Perhaps the name India would strike aa
majestically upon the ear, if in like manner it were to
us the name of a grand complex total. Let me say
then that in the first place it has one region which in
population far exceeds any European State except
Eussia, and exceeds the United States. This is the
region governed by the Lieutenant-Governor of
Bengal, Its population is stated actually to exceed
66,000,000 on an area considerably less than that of
France. Then come two other regions which may
be compared with European States. These are the
North- West Provinces, which answer pretty well to
Great Britain without Ireland, being in area some-
what smaller, but somewhat more populous. Next
comes the Madras Presidency, larger in area — being
about equal to Great Britain with Ireland — but less
populous, being about equal in population to the
Kingdom of Italy. The population in all these three
cases rises far above 20,000,000. Then come two
provinces in which it approaches 20,000,000, the
Punjab, which is somewhat superior in population to
Spain, and the Bombay Presidency, which is slightly
inferior, though in area it is equal to Great Britain
and Ireland. In the next class come Oude, which is
rather superior, and the Central Provinces, which are
about equal, to Belgium and Holland taken together.

II THE INDIAN EMPIRE 219

These provinces, together with some others of less
importance, make up that part of India which is
directly under English government. But the region
which is pi'actically under English supremacy is still
larger. When we speak of the Empire of Napo-
leon, we do not think only of the territory directly
governed by his officials; we reckon -in States
nominally sovereign, which were practically under
his ascendency. Thus the Confederation of the Rhine
consisted of a number of German states which had by
a formal act consented to regard Napoleon as their
Protector. Now England has a similar dependent
confederation in India, and this makes an additional
item which, reckoned by population, is superior to
the United States.

Is it possible that besides our terrible hive of
population at home, giving rise to most anxious
politics, and besides our vast colonial Empire, we are
also responsible for another Empire densely peopled
and about equal to Europe ? Is it possible that about
this Empire we neither have, nor care to acquire, the
most rudimentary information ? Would it be possible
for us, even if we did try to acquire such information,
to form a rational opinion about affairs so remote and
complicated ?

There have been great Empires before now, but
the government of them has generally been in the
hands of a few experts. Rome was forced to commit
her Empire to the care of a single irresponsible
statesman, and could not even reserve for herself her
old civic liberties. In the United States we do indeed

220 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

see a boundless dominion successfully guided under a
democratic system. But the territory in this case,
extensive though it be, is all compact and continuous,
and the population, however large it may come to be,
will still be in the main homogeneous. If the United
States should come into the possession of countries
separated from her by the sea, and of different nation-
ality, her position in the world would be at once
essentially altered. What is unprecedented in the
relation of England to India is the attempt to rule,
not merely by experts, but by a system founded on
public opinion, a population not merely distant, but
wholly alien, wholly unlike in ways of thinking, to
the sovereign public. Public opinion is necessarily
guided by a few large, plain, simple ideas. When the
great interests of the country arc plain, and the great
maxims of its government unmistakable, it may be
able to judge securely even in questions of vast
magnitude. But public opinion is liable to be be-
wildered when it is called on to enter into subtleties,
draw nice distinctions, apply one set of principles
here and another set there. Such bewilderment our
Indian Empire produces. It is so different in kind
both from England itself and from the Colonial
Empire that it requires wholly different principles of
policy. And therefore public opinion does not know
what to make of it, but looks with blank indignation
and despair upon a Government which seems utterly
un-English, which is bureaucratic and in the hands
of a ruling race, which rests mainly on military force,
which raises its revenue, not in the European fashion,

II THE INDIAN EMPIKE 221

but by monopolies of salt and opium, and by taking
the place of a universal landlord, and in a hundred
other ways departs from the traditions of England.

And it may be asked, For what end ? As I have
remarked, the connection itself is not directly profitable
to England. We must look therefore to advantages
which may come to us from it indirectly. We find
then that the trade between the two countries has
gradually grown to be very great indeed. The loss
of the Indian trade which might follow if the country
fell again into anarchy or under a Government which
closed its harbours to our merchants, would amount
to £60,000,000 annually. But we are to set over
against this advantage the great burden which is
imposed by India upon our foreign policy. In the
present state of the world a dependency held by
military force may easily be Hke a millstone round
the neck of a nation; for it may lock up an army
which the nation may grievously need for other
purposes or even for defence. We all conceive with
what satisfaction Bismarck at the present moment
sees France undertaking schemes of conquest in Africa
and Asia. Now if England, which is not a military
state, had in reality to hold down by English military
force a population of two hundred millions, it is
needless to say that such a burden would overwhelm
us. This is not so, owing to a fundamental peculiarity
of the Indian Empire, upon which I shall enlarge
later, the peculiarity, namely, that in the main England
conquered India and now keeps it by means of Indian
troops paid with Indian money. We keep there only

222 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

an English army of 65,000 men. But this is by no
means the whole of the burden which India lays upon
us. India, at the same time that she locks up an
army, more than doubles the difficulty of our foreign
policy. The supreme happiness for a country of
course is to be self-contained, to have no need to
inquire what other nations are doing. Very wisely
did "Washington advise his countrymen to retain this
happiness as long as they could, England cannot
well enjoy it, but if she did not possess India she
might enjoy it comparatively. Her colonies as yet
have for the most part only peaceful or insignificant
or barbarous neighbours, and our old close interest
in European struggles has passed away. But we
continue to be anxiously interested in the East.
Every movement in Turkey, every new symptom in
Egypt, any stirring in Persia or Transoxiana or
Burmah or Afghanistan, we are obliged to watch
with vigilance. The reason is that we have possession
of India. Owing to this we have a leading position
in the system of Asiatic Powers, and a leading
interest in the affairs of all those countries which lie
upon the route to India. This and this only involves
us in that permanent rivalry with Russia, which is to
England in the nineteenth century what the competi-
tion with France for the New World was to her in
the eighteenth.

My object in this lecture is to lay before you the
Indian question in its broad outlines. I have put
together at the outset some considerations which
might incline us to take an anxious or desponding

II THE INDIAN EMPIEE 223

view of it. If it is doubtful whether, we reap any
balance of advantage from our Indian Empire, and if
it is not doubtful that it involves us in enormous
responsibilities and confuses our minds with problems
of hopeless difficulty, may we not feel tempted to
exclaim that it was an evil hour for England when
the daring genius of Clive turned a trading company
into a political Power, and inaugurated a hundred
years of continuous conquest 1 Must we not at least
hold, as many among the distinguished statesmen
who have devoted their lives to Indian affairs have
held, that the Empire is ephemeral, and that the
time is not far off when we must withdraw from
the country ?

On the other hand the wisest men may easily be
mistaken when they speculate on such a subject.
The end of our Indian Empire is perhaps almost as
much beyond calculation as the beginning of it.
There is no analogy in history either for one or the
other. If the government of India from a remote
island seems a thing which can never be permanent,
we know that it once seemed a thing which could
never take place, until it did take place. At any
rate, if the Empire is to fall, we ought to be able to
point already to proofs of its decline. Proofs certainly
we can show of the immense difficulties it has to con-
tend with, but scarcely symptoms of anything which
can be called decline. And again if we should admit,
or not deny, that England has not been repaid in any
way for the trouble that this dependency has cost
her, the admission by itself would have no practical

224 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

importance. Between such an admission and any
practical project, such as that of abandoning the
Empire, there is a gulf fixed.

It is possible to hold that England would be better
off now had she founded no such Empire at all, had
she remained standing, as a mere merchant, on the
threshold of India, as she stands now on that of
China. But the abandonment of India is an idea
which even those who believe that we shall one day
be driven to it are not accustomed to contemplate as
a practical scheme. There are some deeds which,
though they had been better not done, cannot be
undone. A time may conceivably come when it may
be practicable to leave India to herself, but for the
present it is necessary to govern her as if we were to
govern her for ever. Why so 1 Not mainly on our
own account. Some tell us that our honour requires
us to maintain the acquisition which our fathers
made with their blood, and which is the great
military trophy of the nation. To my mind there is
something monstrous in all such notions of honour;
they belong to that primitive and utterly obsolete
class of notions, of which I have spoken before,
which rest upon a confusion between the ideas of
government and property. Nothing is to be con-
sidered for a moment but the well-being of India
and England, and of the two countries India, as being
by much the more nearly interested, by much the
larger, and by much the poorer, is to be considered
before England. But on these very principles, and
especially on account of the interest of India, it is

II THE INDUN EMPIRE 225

impossible for the present to think of abandoning
the task we have undertaken there. We might do
so if our own interest alone were considered. Not
that it would be easy, now that such a vast trade has
grown up and such vast sums of English money,
particularly in these latest years, have been invested
in the country. But it would be possible. On the
other hand if we consider the interest of India, it
appears wholly impossible. Much may be plausibly
alleged against the system under which we govern
India. It may be doubted whether it is altogether
suited to the people, whether it is not needlessly
expensive, and so forth. We may feel a reasonable
anxiety as to what will come in the end of this
unparalleled experiment. But I think it would be a
very extreme view to deny that our Government is
better than any other which has existed in India
since the Mussulman conquest. If it should ulti-
mately fail more than any one imagines, we could
never leave the country in a state half so deplorable
as that in which we found it. A very moderately
good Government is incomparably better than none.
The sudden withdrawal even of an oppressive
Government is a dangerous experiment. Some
countries, no doubt, there are, which might pass
through such a trial without falling into anarchy.
Thinly-peopled countries, or countries whose inhabit-
ants had been long accustomed to much freedom of
action, might be trusted to devise for themselves
very speedily as much government as might be
necessary. But Avhat a mockery to lay down such
Q

226 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

propositions with India in view ! When we began
to take possession of the country, it was already in
a state of wild anarchy such as Europe has perhaps
never known. What government it had was pretty
invariably despotic, and was generally in the hands
of military adventurers, depending on a soldiery
composed of bandits whose whole vocation was
plunder. The Mahratta Power covered the greater
part of India and threatened at once Delhi and
Calcutta, while it had its headquarters at Poonah,
and yet this power was but an organisation of
pillage. Meanwhile in the North, Nadir Shah
rivalled Attila or Tamerlane in his devastating
expeditions. It may be said that this was only a
passing anarchy produced by the dissolution of the
Mogul Empire. Even so, it would show that India
is not a country which can endure the withdrawal
of Government. But have we not a somewhat
exaggerated idea of the Mogul Empire? Its great-
ness was extremely short-lived, and in the Deccan it
seems never really to have established itself. The
anarchy which Clive and Hastings found in India
was not so exceptional a state of things as it might
seem. Probably it was much more intense at that
moment than ever before, but a condition of anarchy
seems almost to have been chronic in India since
Mahmoud, and to have been but suspended for a
while in the Northern half by Akber and Shah
Jehan.

India then is of all countries that which is least
capable of evolving out of itself a stable Government

II THE INDIAN EMPIRE 227

And it is to be feared that our rule may have
diminished what little power of this sort it may have
originally possessed. For our supremacy has neces-
sarily depressed those classes which had anything of
the talent or habit of government. The old royal
races, the noble classes, and in particular the Mussul-
mans who formed the bulk of the official class under
the Great Moguls, have suffered most and benefited
least from our rule. This decay is the staple topic
of lamentation among those who take a dark view of
our Empire ; but is it not an additional reason why
the Empire should continue? Then think of the
immense magnitude of the country ; think too that
we have undermined all fixed moral and religious
ideas in the intellectual classes by introducing the
science of the West into the midst of Brahminical
traditions. When you have made all these reflec-
tions, you will see that to withdraw oui- Government
from a country which is dependent on it, and which
we have made incapable of depending upon anything
else, would be the most inexcusable of all conceivable
crimes, and might possibly cause the most stupendous
of all conceivable calamities.

Such then in its broad outline is the Indian
Question of the present day. In what way did such
a question grow up 1 How did we come into posses-
sion of a dependency so enormous ?

LECTUEE III

HOW WE CONQUERED INDIA

The question how we conquered India does not at
all resemble the questions which I raised in the last
course. Our colonists in the new world occupied, to
be sure, a vast territory, but it was comparatively
an empty territory. The difficulties they encountered
arose not so much from the natives, as from the
rivalry of other European nations. By what degrees
and from what causes we gained the advantage over
these rivals, I partly discussed. It was a question to
which the answer was not at once obvious, but at the
same time not extremely difficult to find. On the
other hand it is at first sight extremely perplexing
to understand how we could conquer India. Here
the population was dense, and its civilisation, though
descending along a different stream of tradition, was
as real and ancient as our own. We have learnt
from many instances in European history to think it
almost impossible really to conquer an intelligent
people wholly alien in language and religion from its

LECT. Ill HOW WE CONQUERED INDIA 229

invaders. The whole power of Spain could not in
eighty years conquer the Dutch provinces with their
petty population. The Swiss could not be conquered
in old time, nor the Greeks the other day. Nay, at
the very time when we made the first steps in the
conquest of India, we showed ourselves wholly un-
able to reduce to obedience three millions of our own
race in America, who had thrown off their allegiance
to the English Crown. What a singular contrast is
here ! Never did the English show so much languid
incompetence as in the American War, so that it
might have seemed evident that their age of greatness
was over, and that the decline of England had begun.
But precisely at this time they were appearing as
irresistible conquerors in India, and showing a superior-
ity which led them to fancy themselves a nation of
heroes. How is the contradiction to be explained 1

History is studied with so little seriousness, with
so little desire or expectation of arriving at any solid
result, that the contradiction passes almost unre-
marked, or at most gives occasion to a tiiumphant
reflection that after all there was life in us yet.
And indeed it may seem that, however difficult of
explanation the fact may be, there can be no doubt
of it. Over and over again in India, at Plassey, at
Assaye, and on a hundred other battlefields, our
troops have been victorious against great odds, so
that here at least it seems that we may indidgc our
national self-complacency without restraint, and feel
that at any rate in comparison with the Hindu races
we really are terrible fellows i

230 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

But does this hypothesis really remove the diffi-
culty 1 Suppose that one Englishman is really equal
as a soldier to ten or twenty Hindus, can we even
then conceive the whole of India conquered by the
English 'i There were not more than twelve millions
of Englishmen at the time when the conquest began,
and it was made in a period when England had other
wars on her hands. Olive's career falls partly in the
Seven Years' War of Europe, and the great annexa-
tions of Lord Wellesley were made in the midst of
our war with Napoleon. We are not a military
state. We did not in those times profess to be able
to put on foot at any moment a great expeditionary
army. Accordingly in our European wars we usually
confined ourselves to acting with our fleet, while for
hostilities on land it was our practice to subsidise
any ally we might have among the military states,
at one time Austria, at another Prussia. How then
in spite of all this weakness by land could we manage
to conquer during this time the greater part of India,
an enormous region of nearly a million square miles
and inhabited by two hundred millions of people!
What a drain such a work must have made upon
our military force, what a drain upon our treasury !
And yet somehow the drain seems never to have
been perceived. Our European wars involved us in
a debt that we have never been able to pay. But
our Indian wars have not swelled the National Debt.
The exertions we had to make there seem to have
left no trace behind them.

It seems then that there must be something wrong

Ill HOW WE CONQUEKED INDIA 231

in the conception which is current, that a number of
soldiers went over from England to India, and there
by sheer superiority in valour and intelligence con-
quered the whole country. In the last great
Mahratta war of 1818 we had, it appears, more than
a hundred thousand men in the field. But what !
that was the time of mortal exhaustion that succeeded
the great Napoleonic War. Is it possible that only
three years after the battle of Waterloo we were at
war again on a vast scale and had a much greater
army in India than Lord Wellington had in Spain 1
Again at the present moment the army kept in foot
in India amounts to two hundred thousand men.
What ! two hundred thousand English soldiers !
And yet we are not a military State !

You see of course what the fact is that I point at.
This Indian army, we all know, does not consist of
English soldiers, but mainly of native troops. Out
of 200,000 only 65,000, or less than a third, are
English. And even this proportion has only been
established since the mutiny, after which catastrophe
the English troops were increased and the native
troops diminished in number. Thus I find that at
the time of the mutiny there were 45,000 European
troops to 235,000 native troops in India — that is, less
than a fifth. In 1808 again I find only 25,000
Englishmen to 130,000 natives — that is, somewhat less
than* a fifth. The same proportion obtained in 1773
at the time of the Kegulating Act, when British
India first took shape. At that date the Company's
army consisted of 9000 Europeans and 45,000 natives.

232 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECt.

Before that I find the proportion of Europeans even
lower — about a seventh ; and if we go back to the
very beginning we find that from the first the Indian
army was rather a native than a European force.
Thus Colonel Chesney opens his historical view of
it in these words : " The first establishment of the
Company's Indian Army may be considered to date
from the year 1748, when a small body of sepoys
was raised at Madras after the example set by the
French, for the defence of that settlement. ... At
the same time a small European force was raised,
formed of such sailors as could be spared from the
ships on the coast and of men smuggled on board the
Company's vessels in England by the crimps."

In the early battles of the Company by which its
power was decisively established, at the siege of
Arcot, at Plassey, at Buxar, there seem almost always
to have been more sepoys than Europeans on the side
of the Company. And let us observe further that we
do not hear of the sepoys as fighting ill, or of the
English as bearing the whole brunt of the conflict.
No one who has remarked the childish eagerness with
which historians indulge their national vanity, will
be surprised to find that our English writers in
describing these battles seem unable to discern the
sepoys. Eead Macaulay's Essay on Clive ; every-
where it is " the imperial people," " the mighty
children of the sea," " none could resist Clive and his
Englishmen." But if once it is admitted that the
sepoys always outnumbered the English, and that
they kept pace with the English in efficiency aa

in HOW WE CONQUERED INDIA 233

soldiers, the whole theory which attributes our
successes to an immeasurable natural superiority in
valouf falls to the ground. In those battles in which
our troops were to the enemy as one to ten, it will
appear that if we may say that one Englishman
shoAved himself equal to ten natives, we may also say
that one sepoy did the same. It follows that, though
no doubt there w^as a difference, it was not so much a
difference of race as a difference of discipline, of
military science, and also no doubt in many cases a
difference of leadership.

Oljserve that Mill's summary explanation of the
conquest of India says nothing of any natiu-al supe-
riority on the part of the English. "The two
important discoveries for conquering India were :
1st, the weakness of the native armies against
European discipline ; 2ndly, the facility of imparting
that discipline to natives in the Euroi)ean service."
He adds : " Both discoveries were made by the
French."

And even if we should admit that the English
fought better than the sepoys, and took more than
their share in those achievements which both per-
formed in common, it remains entirely incorrect to
speak of the English nation as having conquered the
nations of India. The nations of India have been
conquered by an army of which on the average about
a fifth part was English. But we not only exaggerate
our own share in the achievement ; we at the same
time entirely misconceive and misdescribe the achieve-
ment itself. For from what race were the other four

234 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

fifths of the army drawn 1 From the natives of India
themselves ! India can hardly be said to have been
conquered at all by foreigners ; she has rather
conquered herself. If we were justified, which we
are not, in personifying India as we personify France
or England, we could not describe her as over-
whelmed by a foreign enemy ; we should rather have
to say that she elected to put an end to anarchy by
submitting to a single Government, even though
that Government was in the hands of foreigners.

But that description would be as false and mis-
leading as the other, or as any expression which
presupposes India to have been a conscious political
whole. The truth is that there was no India in the
political, and scarcely in any other, sense. The word
was a geographical expression, and therefore India
was easily conquered, just as Italy and Germany fell
an easy prey to Napoleon, because there was no
Italy and no Germany, and not even any strong
Italian or German national feeling. Because there
was no Germany, Napoleon was able to set one
German state against another, so that in fighting
with Austria or Prussia he had Bavaria and Wiirttem-
berg for allies. As Napoleon saw that this means of
conquest lay ready to his hand in Central Europe, so
the Frenchman Dupleix early perceived that this road
to empire in India lay open to any European state
that might have factories there. He saw a condition
of chronic war between one Indian state and another,
and he perceived that by interfering in their quarrels
the foreigner might arrive to hold the balance be-

lU HOW WE CONQUERED INDIA 235

tween them. He acted upon this view, and accord-
ingly the whole history of European Empire in India
begins with the interference of the French in the
war of succession in Hyderabad that broke out on the
death of the great Nizam ul Mulk (1748).

The fundamental fact then is that India had no
jealousy of the foreigner, because India had no sense
whatever of national unity, because there was no
India, and therefore, properly speaking, no foreigner.
So far, as I have pointed out, parallel examples may
be found in Europe. But we must imagine a much
greater degree of political deadness in India than in
Germany eighty years ago, if we would understand
the fact now under consideration, the fact namely
that the English conquered India by means of a
sepoy army. In Germany there was scarcely any
German feeling, but there was a certain amount,
though not a very great amount, of Prussian feeling,
Austrian feeling, Bavarian feeling, Suabian feeling.
Napoleon is able to set Bavaria against Austria or
both against Prussia, but he does not attempt to set
Bavaria or Austria or Prussia against itself. To
speak more distinctly, he procures by treaties that
the Elector of Bavaria shall furnish a contingent to
the army which he leads against Austria; but he
does not, simply by offering pay, raise an army of
Germans and then use them in the conquest of
Germany. This would be the exact parallel to what
lias been witnessed in India. A parallel to the fact
that India has been conquered by an army of which
four-fifths were natives and only one -fifth English,

236 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.

would be found in Europe, if England had invaded
France, and then by offering good pay had raised an
army of Frenchmen large enough to conquer the
country. The very idea seems monstrous. What !
you exclaim, an army of Frenchmen quietly under-
take to make war upon France ! And yet, if you
reflect, you will see that such a thing is abstractedly
quite possible, and that it might have been witnessed
if the past history of France had been different. We
can imagine that a national feeling had never sprung
up in France ; this we can easily imagine, because we
know that the twelfth century is full of wars between
a king who reigned at Paris and another who reigned
at Rouen. But let us imagine further that the
different Governments established in different parts
of France were mostly foreign Governments, that in
fact the country had been conquered before and was
still living under the yoke of foreign rulers. We can
well understand that if in a country thus broken to the
foreign yoke a disturbed state of affairs supervened,
making mercenary war a lucrative profession, such a
country might come to be full of professional soldiers
equally , ready to take service with any Government
and against any Government, native or foreign.

Now the condition of India was such as this. The
English did not introduce a foreign domination
into it, for the foreign domination was there already.
In fact we bring to the subject a fixed miscon-
ception. The homogeneous European community,
a definite territory possessed by a definite race — in
one word, the Nation -State, — though we assume

Ill HOW WE CONQUERED INDIA 237

it as if it were a matter of course, is in fact much
more exceptional than we suppose, and yet it is
upon the assumption of such a homogeneous com-
munity that all our ideas of patriotism and public
virtue depend. The idea of nationality seems in
India to be thoroughly confused. The distinction of
national and foreign seems to be lost. Not only has
a tide of Mussulman invasion covered the country ever
since the eleventh century, but even if we go back to
the earliest times we still find a mixture of races,
a domination of race by race. That Aryan, Sanscrit-
speaking race which, as the creators of Brahminism,
have given to India whatever unity it can be said to
have, appear themselves as invaders, and as invaders
who have not succeeded in swallowing up and absorb-
ing the older nationalities. The older, not Indo-
Germanic race, has in Europe almost disappeared,
and at any rate has left no trace in our European
languages, but in India the older stratum is every-
where visible. The spoken languages there are not
mere corruptions of Sanscrit, but mixtures of Sanscrit
with older languages wholly different, and in the
south not Sanscrit at all. Brahminism too, which at
first sight seems universal, turns out on examination
to be a mere vague eclecticism, which has given a
show of imity to superstitions wholly unlike and
unrelated to each other. It follows that in India the
fundamental postulate cannot be granted, upon which
the whole political ethics of the West depend. The
homogeneous community does not exist there, out of
which the State properly so called arises. Indeed to

238 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect

satisfy ourselves of this it is not necessary to travel
so far back into the past. It is enough to notice that
since the time of Mahmoud of Ghazni a steady stream
of Mussulman invasion has poured into India. The
majority of the Governments of India were Mussul-
man long before the arrival of the Mogul in the
sixteenth century. From this time therefore in most
of the Indian States the tie of nationality was broken.
Government ceased to rest upon right; the State
lost its right to appeal to patriotism.

In such a state of affairs what is called the conquest
of India by the English can be explained without
supposing the natives of India to be below other
races, just as it does not force us to regard the English
as superior to other races. We regard it as the duty
of a man to fight for his country against the foreigner.
But what is a man's country 1 When we analyse the
notion, we find it presupposes the man to have been
bred up in a community which may be regarded as a
great family, so that it is natural for him to think of
the land itself as a mother. But if the community
has not been at all of the nature of a family, but has
been composed of two or three races hating each
other, if not the country, but at most the village has
been regarded as a home, then it is not the fault of
the natives of it that they have no patriotism but
village-patriotism. It is one thing to receive a foreign
yoke for the first time, and quite a different thing to
exchange one foreign yoke for another.

But, as I have pointed out, the surprising feature
in the English conquest of India is not so much that

Ill HOW WE CONQUERED INDIA 239

it should have been made, as that it should have cost
England no effort and no trouble. The English people
have not paid taxes, the English Government has not
opened loans, no conscription was ever introduced,
nay, no drain of men was ever perceived, and no
difficulty was ever felt in carrying on other wars at
the same time, because we were engaged in conquer-
ing a population equal to that of Europe. This seems
at first sight incredible, but I have already given the
explanation of it. As to the finance of all these wars,
it falls under the general principle which applies to
all wars of conquest. Conquest pays its own expenses.
As Napoleon had never any financial difficulties,
because he lived at the expense of those whom he
vanquished in war, so the conquest of India was
made, as a matter of course, at the expense of India.
The only difficulty then is to understand how the
army could be created. And this difficulty too
disappears, when we observe that four-fifths of this
army was always composed of native troops.

If we fix our attention upon this all-important fact
we shall be led, if I mistake not, to perceive that the
expression " conquest," as applied to the acquisition
of sovereignty by the East India Company in India,
is not merely loose but thoroughly misleading, and
tempts us to class the event among events which it in
no way resembles. I have indeed remarked more
than once before that this expression, whenever it is
used, requires far more definition than it commonly
receives, and that it may bear several different
meanings. But surely the word is only applicable

240 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

at all when it refers to some action done to one state
by another. There is war between two states ; the
army of the one state invades the other and overturns
the Government of it, or at least forces the Govern-
ment to such humiliating terms that it is practically
deprived of its independence ; this is conquest in the
proper sense. Now when we say that England has
conquered India, we ought to mean that something
of this sort has happened betAveen England and India.
When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian
Empire, there was war between the Macedonian state
and the Persian, in which the latter was subjugated.
When Caesar conquered Gaul, he acted in the name
of the Roman Republic, holding an office conferred
on him by the senate, and commanding the army of
the Roman state. But nothing of this sort happened
in India. The King of England did not declare war
upon the Great Mogul or upon any Nawab or Rajah
in India. The English state would perhaps have had
no concern from first to last in the conquest of India
but for this circumstance, that it engaged five times
in war with France after the French settlements in
India had become considerable, and that these wars,
being partly waged in India, were in a certain degree
mixed up with the wars between the East India
Company and the native Powers of India. If we
wish clearly to understand the natiu-e of the phe-
nomenon, we ought to put this circumstance, which
was accidental, on one side. We shall then see that
nothing like what is strictly called a conquest took
place, but that certain traders inhabiting certain sea-

Ill now WE CONQUERED INDIA 241

port towns in India, were induced, almost forced, in
the anarchy caused by the fall of the Mogul Empire,
to give themselves a military character and employ
troops, that by means of these troops they acquired
territory and at last almost all the territory of India,
and that these traders happened to be Englishmen,
and to employ a certain, though not a large, propor-
tion of English troops in their army.

Now this is not a foreign conquest, but rather an
internal revolution. In any country when government
breaks down and anarchy sets in, the general law is
that a struggle follows between such organised powers
as remain in the country, and that the most powerful
of these sets up a Government. In France for
instance after the fall of the House of Bourbon in
1792 a new Government was set up chiefly through
the influence of the Municipality of Paris; this
Government having fallen into discredit a few years
later was superseded by a military Government
wielded by Bonaparte. Now India about 1750 was
in a condition of anarchy caused by a decay in the
Mogul Empire, which had begun at the death of
Aurungzebe in 1707. The imperial authority having
everywhere lost its force over so vast a territory, the
general law began to operate. Everywhere the minor
organised powers began to make themselves supreme.
These powers, after the fashion of India, were most
commonly mercenary bands of soldiers, commanded
either by some provincial governor of the falling
Empire, or by some adventurer who seized an
opportunity of rising to the command of them, or
R

242 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

lastly by some local power which had existed before
the establishment of the Mogul supremacy and had
never completely yielded to it. To give an example
of each kind of power, the state of Hyderabad was
founded by the satrap of the Great Mogul called the
Nizam, the state of Mysore was founded by the
Mussulman adventurer Hyder Ali, who rose from the
ranks by mere military ability, the great Mahratta
confederacy of chieftains headed by the Peishwa, a
Brahminical not a Mussulman Power, represented
the older India of the time before the Mogul. But
all these powers alike subsisted by means of mercenary
armies ; they lived in a state of chronic war and
mutual plunder such as, I suppose, has hardly been
witnessed in Europe except perhaps in the dissolution
of the Carolingian Empire.

Such a state of affairs was peculiarly favourable to
the rise of new powers. In other circumstances con-
quest presupposes what I may call a capital fund of
power. No one can undertake it that does not
already possess a recognised authority and an army.
In those circumstances it was otherwise. Hyder Ali
had nothing but his head and his right arm, and he
became Sultan of Mysore. For mercenary armies were
everywhere; they were at the service of every one who
could pay them or win an influence over them ; and
any one who commanded a mercenary army was on a
level with the greatest potentates of India, since in
the dissolution of authority the only force left was
military force.

Now among the different local powers in India,

Ill HOW WE CONQUERED INDIA 243

which in such peculiar circumstances might strike for
empire with some chance of success, were certain
merchants who had factories in the seaport towns.
They were foreigners indeed, but, as I have pointed
out, this could make no difference in India, where most
Governments were foreign, Avhere the Great Mogul
himself was a foreigner. Much rhetoric has been
spent on the miraculousness of the fortune of the
East India Company. It is true that there had been
no previous example of such a fortune, and that for
this reason it would not have occurred to any one to
predict such a fortune. But it was not miraculous in
the sense of being hard to account for or having
no visible cause. For the East India Company had
really some capital to start with. It had a command
of money, it had two or three fortresses, the command
of the sea, and it had the advantage of being a cor-
poration— that is, it was not liable to be killed in
battle or to die of a fever. We are not much
astonished when an individual rises from some
private station into empire over a great territory,
because this has happened often. And yet intrinsic-
ally it is much more astonishing. That the younger
son of a poor nobleman in Corsica should control the
greater part of Europe with despotic power, is in-
trinsically far more wonderful than that the East
India Company should conquer India, for Bonaparte
began without interest, without friends, without a
penny in his pocket, and yet he not only gained his
empire but lost it again in less than twenty years. In
like manner the rise of Hyder Ali, or of Scindiah, or

244 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.

of Holkar, Avas more wonderful and demanded more
of the special favour of fortune than the rise of the
East India Company. You see that I wish you to
place this event in a different class of events from
that in which it is commonly placed. It is not the
conquest of one state by another. It is not an event
in which two states are concerned, at least directly ;
it is not an event belonging to the foreign department.
It is an internal revolution in Indian society, and is
to be compared to one of those sudden usurpations or
coups d'dtat, by which a period of disturbance within
a community is closed. Let us imagine for a
moment that the merchants who rose to power had
not been foreign at all, — the nature of the event is not
thereby altered. We may suppose that a number of
Parsee merchants in Bombay, tired of the anarchy
which disturbed their trade, had subscribed together
to establish fortresses and raise troops, and then
that they had had the good fortune to employ able
generals. In that case they too might have had their
Plassey and their Buxar; they too might have ex-
torted from the Great Mogul the Dewannee, or
financial administration of a province, and so laid the
foundations of an Empire, which might in time have
extended over all India. In that case we should have
had substantially the same event, but it would have
appeared clearly in its true light. We should have
recognised it as having the nature of an internal
revolution, as being the effect of the natural struggle
which every community makes to put down the
anarchy which is tearing it to pieces.

Ill HOW WE CONQUERED INDIA 245

In such an event as that there would have been
nothing very miraculous, and yet the rise of the East
India Company was mucli less miraculous. For the
Company was closely connected with Europe, and
could call in the military science and discipline of
Europe, which was evidently superior to that of India.
That same Frenchman Dupleix, who laid down so
clearly the theory of the conquest of India, perceived
that the native armies could not for a moment stand
before European troops, but he perceived also that
the native of India was quite capable of receiving
European discipline and learning to fight with
European eflBciency. This then was the talisman
which the Company possessed, and which enabled
it not merely to hold its own among the Powers of
India but to surpass them, — not some incommunic-
able physical or moral superiority, as we love to
imagine — but a superior discipline and military
system, which could be communicated to the natives
of India.

Beyond this they had another great advantage.
They did not, to be sure, represent the English State,
but yet their connection with England was of infinite
service to them. They had indeed to procure in
the main for themselves the money and the men by
which India was conquered. But as a chartered
Company which had the monopoly of English trade
in India and China, they were an object of interest
to the P]nglish Government and to Parliament. It
several times happened that the war by which they
acquired Indian territory wore the appearance before

246 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

the English public of a war between England and
France, and was therefore heartily supported by the
nation. This is a fact of fundamental importance,
which has not often been sufficiently considered.
The English conquest of India began not in some
quarrel between the Company and a native Power.
It began in an alarming attempt made by the French
to get control over the Deccan, and so among other
things to destroy the English settlements at Madras
and Bombay, by interfering in the question of the
Hyderabad succession. Our first military step in the
East was to defend ourselves against the French
attack. And from that time for nearly seventy years
—that is, to the end of the war with Napoleon, — our
wars in India never ceased to wear more or less the
appearance of defensive wars against France. The
effect of this was that, though they were not waged
in the name or at the expense of the State, yet they
seemed to a certain extent national wars, — wars in
which England was deeply concerned. To a consider-
able extent therefore the Company's troops were
aided by Royal troops, and from 1785, when Lord
Cornwallis went out as Governor-General, an English
statesman of mark was sent out to preside over the
political and -military aflfairs. The attacks that were
made upon the Company in Parliament, the vote of
censure moved against Lord Clive, the impeachment
brought against Hastings, the successive ministerial
schemes for regulating the Company's affairs, one of
which in 1783 convulsed the whole political world of
England, all these interferences contributed to make

Ill HOW WE CONQUEEED INDIA 247

our Indian wars seem national wars, and to identify
the Company Avitli the EngKsh nation. In this way
the Company was practically backed by the credit and
renown of a first-class European state, though at the
same time that state contributed little to the wars by
which the Company acquired territory.

The words " wonderful," " strange," are often ap-
plied to great historical events, and there is no event
to which they have been applied more freely than
to our conquest of India. But an event may be
wonderful or strange without being necessarily at all
difficult to account for. The conquest of India is very
wonderful in the sense that nothing similar to it had
ever happened before, and that therefore nothing
similar coiild be expected by those who for the first
century and a half administered the afiairs of the
Company in India. No doubt Job Charnock, or
Josiah Child, or Governor Pitt of Madras (grand-
father of the great Lord Chatham), or perhaps Major
Lawrence, never dreamed that we should one day
suppress the authority alike of the Peishwa of the
Mahrattas and of the Great Mogul himself. But the
event was not wonderful in the sense that it is diffi-
cult to discover adequate causes by which it could
have been produced. If we begin by remarking that
authority in India had fallen on the ground through
the decay of the Mogul Empire, that it lay there
waiting to be picked up by somebody, and that all
over India in that period adventurers of one kind or
another were founding Empires, it is really not sur-
prising that a mercantile corporation which had money

248 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

to pay a mercenary force, should be able to compete
with other adventurers, nor yet that it should out-
strip all its competitors by bringing into the field
English military science and generalship, especially
when it was backed over and over again by the whole
power and credit of England and directed by English
statesmen.

The sum of what I have urged is that the conquest
of India is not in the ordinary sense a conquest at all,
because it was not the act of a state and was not
accomplished by the army and the money of a state.
I have pointed this out in order to remove the per-
plexity which must be caused by the statement that
England conquered India — that is, a population as
large as that of Europe and many thousand miles off, —
and yet that England is not a military state, though
this enormous conquest was achieved by England
•svithout any exhausting effort and without any ex-
pense. The explanation of this contradiction is that
England did not in the strict sense conquer India,
but that certain Englishmen, who happened to reside
in India at the time when the Mogul Empire fell, had
a fortune like that of Hyder Ali or Kunjeet Singh,
and rose to supreme power there.

But yet of course in its practical result the event
has proved to be a conquest of India by England.
For now that the process is comjflete and the East
India Company has been swept away, we see that
Queen Victoria is Empress of India, and that a
Secretary, who is a member of the English Cabinet
and sits in the English Parliament, is responsible for

m HOW WE CONQUERED INDIA 249

the administration of India. England as a state
did not make the acquisition, yet it has fallen to
England. This is merely an exemplification of the
general principle, which, as I pointed out above, has
governed all the settlements of Europeans outside
Europe since the time of Columbus. However far
they roamed, however strange and wonderful was
their success, they were never able at the outset to
shake off their European citizenship. Cortez and
Pizarro trampled under their feet the Governments
they found in America. With scarcely an effort they
made themselves supreme wherever they came. But
though they could set at nought in Mexico the
authority of Montezuma, they could not resist or
dream of resisting the authority of Charles V., who
was on the other side of the Atlantic. The conse-
quence was that whatever conquests they made by
their own unassisted audacity and effort were con-
fiscated at once and as a matter of course by Spain.
So with the English in India. After 1765 the East
India Company held nominally a high office in the
Empire of the Great Mogul. But it was asserted at
once by the English Parliament that whatever terri-
torial acquisitions might be made by the Company
were under the control of Parliament. The Great
Mogul's name was scarcely mentioned in the discus-
sion, and the question seems never to have been
raised whether he would consent to the administra-
tion of his provinces of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa
being thus conducted under the control of a foreign
Government. The Company made part of two states

250 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect. ill

at once. It was a Company under a Charter from
the King of England; it was a Dewan under the
Great Mogul. But it swept away the Great Mogul,
as Cortez swept away Montezuma ; on the other
hand it submitted all its boundless acquisitions
meekly to the control of England, and at last, when
a century was completed from the battle of Plassey,
it suffered itself to be abolished and surrendered
India to the English Government.

LECTURE IV

HOW WE GOVERN INDIA

I HAVE considered the nature of the relation in which
India stands to England, and have tried to explain
how this relation could spring up without a miracle.
We may now advance a step and form some opinion
on the question whether that relation can endure
without a miracle, as it was created without one, or
whether we ought to regard the government of India
by the English as a kind of political tmr de force, a
matter of astonishment while it lasts, but certain not
to last very long. For the great difficulty which the
student has to contend Avith in studying Indian
affairs is the dazzling effect of events so strange, so
remote, and on a scale so large, by which he is led to
think that ordinary causation is not to be expected
in India, and that in that region all is miraculous.
The rhetorical tone ordinarily adopted in history
favours this illusion ; historians are fond of parading
all the strange and marvellous features of the Indian
Empire, as if it were less their business to account

252 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LBCT.

for what happens than to make it seem more un-
accountable than before.

Thus Ave come to think of our ascendency in India
as an exception to all ordinary rules, a standing
miracle in politics, onlj^ to be explained by the heroic
qualities of the English race and their natural genius
for government. So long as we take this view, it is
of course impossible for us to form any opinion
concerning the duration of it. What was a miracle
at the beginning is likely to continue so to the end.
If ordinary laws are suspended, who shall say how
long the suspension is likely to last ? Now I have
tried to look calmly at our Empire in its beginning.
I have examined the conquest of India, and have
found that it is indeed miraculous in the sense of
being unlike our experience — the revolutions of
Asiatic society would naturally be unlike those of
Europe — but that it is not miracidous in the sense of
being unaccountable, or even difficult to account for.
I now inquire whether our government of India is
miraculous in this sense.

It must certainly appear so, if we assume that
India is simply a conquered country and the English
its conquerors. Who does not know the extreme
difficulty of repressing the disaffection of a conquered
population ? Over and over again it has been found
impossible, even where the superiority both in , the
number and efficiency of troops has been decidedly
on the side of the conquerors. When the Spaniards
failed in the Low Countries, they were the best
soldiers and Spain by far the greatest state in

IV HOW WE GOVERN INDIA 253

Christendom. For the instinct of nationality or of
separate religion mere than supplies the place of
valour or of discipline, being diffused through the
whole population and not confined to the fighting
part of it. Let us compare the parallel case of Italy.
Italy corresponds in the map of Europe to India in
that of Asia. It is a similar peninsula at the south
of the Continent, with a mighty mountain range
above it, and below this a great river flowing from
west to east. It is still more similar in the circum-
stance that for many centuries it was a prey to
foreign invaders. No long time ago Italy was sub-
ject to the ascendency and partly to the actual rule
of Austria. Its inhabitants were less warlike, its
armies much less efficient, than those of Austria, and
Austria was close at hand. And yet, though fighting
at so much disadvantage, Italy has made herself
free. In the field she was generally defeated, but
the feeling of nationality was so strong within and
attracted so much sympathy without, that she has
had her way, and the foreigner has left her to her-
self. Now in every point India is more advan-
tageously situated with respect to England than Italy
with respect to Austria. She has a population about
eight times as great as that of England ; she is at the
other side of the globe ; and then England does not
profess to be a military state. Yet to all appearance
she submits to the yoke ; we do not hear of rebellions.
In conducting the government of India we meet with
difficulties, l)ut tliey are chiefly financial and econo-
mical. The particular difficulty which in Italy was

254 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

too much for Austria we do not encounter ; we do
not feel the difficulty of repressing the disaffection of
a conquered nationality. Is not this miraculous?
Does it not seem as if all ordinary laws were sus-
pended in this case, or as if we might assume that
there are no bounds either to the submissiveness of
the Hindu or to the genius for government of the
English ?

What I urged above may partly prepare you for
the answer which I make to this question. In the
question it is assumed, first, that India constitutes a
nationality ; secondly, that this nationality has been
conquered by England. Now both these assumptions
are wholly unfounded.

First the notion that India is a nationality rests
upon that vulgar error which political science
principally aims at eradicating. We in Europe,
accustomed to see the map of Europe divided into
countries each of which is assigned to a peculiar
nationality, of which a special language is the badge,
fall into a profound misconception. We assume that
wherever, inside or outside of Europe, there is a
country which has a name, there must be a nationality
answering to it. At the same time we take no pains
to conceive clearly or define precisely what we call a
nationality. We content ourselves with remarking
that we in England should be most unwilling to be
governed by the French, and that the French would
be sorry to be governed by the Germans, and from
these examples we draw the conclusion that the
people of India must in like manner feel it a deep

IV HOW WE GOVERN INDIA 255

humiliation to be governed by the English. Such
notions spring from mere idleness and inattention.
It does not need proving, it is sufficient merely to
state, that it is not every population which constitutes
a nationality. The English and the French are not
mere populations ; they are populations united in a
very special way and by very special forces. Let
us think of some of these uniting forces, and then ask
whether they operate upon the populations of India.
The first is community of race, or rather the belief
in a community of race. This, when it appears on a
large scale, is identical with community of language.
The English are those who speak English, the French
those who speak French. Now do the inhabitants of
India speak one language 1 The answer is. No more,
but rather less, than the inhabitants of Europe speak
one language ! So much has been said by philologers
about Sanscrit and its affinities with other languages,
that it is necessary to remark that it is an obvious
community of language, of which the test is intelligi-
bility, and not some hidden affinity, that acts as a
uniting force. Thus the Italians regarded the Aus-
trians as foreigners because they could not under-
stand German, without troubling themselves to
consider that German as well as Italian is an Indo-
European language. There is affinity among several
of the languages of India, as among those of Europe.
The Hindi languages may be compared witli the
Romance languages of Europe, as being descendants of
the ancient language, but the mutual affinity of the
Bengali, the Marathi, the Guzerati does not help to

256 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

make those who speak them one nation. The
Hindustani has sprung out of the Mussulman
conquest, by a mixture of the Persian of the invaders
with the Hindi languages of the natives. But in the
South we find a linguistic discrepancy in India
greater than any which exists in Europe, for the
great languages of the South, Tamil, Telugu,
Canarese, are not Indo-European at all, and they are
spoken by populations far larger than those Finns
and Magyars of Europe whose language is not Indo-
European.

This fact is enough by itself to show that the
name India ought not to be classed with such names
as England or France, which correspond to nation-
alities, but rather with such as Europe, marking a
group of nationalities which have chanced to obtain a
common name owing to some physical separation.
Like Europe it is a mere geogra})hic expression, but
even so, it has been much less uniformly used than
the na«ie Europe. Europe at any rate has been
used in much the same sense since the time of
Herodotus, but our present use of the word India is
not perhaps very old. To us indeed it seems natural
that the whole country which is marked off from
Asia by the great barrier of the Himalaya and the
Suleiman range should have a single name. But it
has not always seemed so. The Greeks had but a
very vague idea of this country. To them for a long
time the word India was for practical purposes what
it was etymologically, the province of the Indus.
When they say that Alexander invaded India, they

IV HOW WE GOVERN INDIA 257

refer to the Punjab. At a later time they obtained
some information about the valley of the Ganges,
but little or none about the Deccan. Meanwhile in
India itself it did not seem so natural as it seems to
us to give one name to the whole region. For there
is a very marked difference between the northern and
southern parts of it. The great Aryan community
which spoke Sanscrit and invented Brahminism
spread itself chiefly from the Punjab along the great
valley of the Ganges, but not at first far southward.
Accordingly the name Hindostan properly belongs to
this Northern region. In the South or peninsula we
find other races and non-Aryan languages, though
Brahminism has extended itself there too. Even the
Mogul Empire in its best time did not much penetrate
into this region.

It appears then that India is not a political name,
but only a geographical expression like Europe or
Africa. It does not mark the territory of a nation
and a language, but the territory of many *hations
and many languages. Here is the fundamental
difference between India and such countries as Italy,
in which the principle of nationality has asserted
itself. Both India and Italy were divided among a
number of states, and so were weak in resistance to
the foreigner. But Italy, though divided by organ-
isation, was one by nationality. The same language
pervaded it, and out of this language had sprung a
great literature, which was the common possession of
the whole peninsula. India, as I have pointed out,
is no more united by language than Europe is.
S

258 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LBOT.

But nationality is compounded of several elements,
of which a sense of kindred is only one. The sense
of a common interest and the habit of forming a
single political whole constitute another element.
This too has been very weak, though perhaps it has
not been altogether wanting in India. The country
might seem almost too large for it, but the barrier
which separates India from the rest of the world is so
much more effective than any barrier between one
part of India than another, that in spite of all
ethnical and local divisions some vague conception of
India as at least a possible whole has existed from
a very ancient time. In the shadowy traditionary
history of the times before Mahmoud of Ghazni it is
vaguely related of this king and that king that he
was lord of all India ; the dominion of some historical
princes in the first Mohammedan period, and finally
the Mogul Empire, were approximately universal.
But we must not exaggerate the greatness of the
Mogul Empire, or imagine that it answers in India
to the Eoman Empire in Europe. Observe how short
its duration was. We cannot put the very com-
mencement of it earlier than 1524, the date of the
capture of Lahore by Baber — that is, in Henry VIII. 's
reign. When Vasco da Gama landed in India it had
not begun to exist, and its marked and rapid decline
begins in 1707 — that is, in Queen Anne's reign.
Between these dates there is less than two centuries.
But next observe that the Mogul Empire cannot be
properly said to have existed from the moment when
Baber entered India, but only from the moment wheo

rv HOW WE GOVERN INDIA 259

the Indian dominion of the Moguls became extensive.
Now at the accession of Akber, which was in 1559,
or the year after that of Queen Elizabeth, this Empire
consisted simply of the Punjab and the country
round Delhi and Agra. It was not till 1576 that
Akber conquered Bengal, and he conquered Sind and
Guzerat between 1591 and 1594. His empire was
now extensive, but if we consider 1594 instead of
1524 as the date of the commencement of the Mogul
Empire, we reduce its duration to little more than a
century.

Next observe that even at this time it by no
means includes all India. To imagine this is to con-
fuse India with Hindostan. Akber's dominion in
1595 was limited by the Nerbudda, and he had not
yet set foot in the Deccan. He was Emperor of
Hindostan, but by no means of India. In his later
years he invaded the Deccan, and from this time the
Mogul pretensions began to extend to the Southern
half of India. But it cannot be said that anything
like a conquest of the Deccan was made before the
great expedition of Aurungzebe in 1683. From this
time we may, if we choose, speak of the Mogul
Empire as including the Deccan, and therefore as
uniting all India under one Government, though the
subjection of the Deccan was chiefly nominal, for the
Mahratta Power was already rising fast. But thus
the duration of the Empire is reduced to a mere
moment, for the Mogul Emperors purchased this ex-
tension of their dominion by the ruin of the Empire.
Within twenty-four years decay had become visible.

'260 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LBOT.

and, as I take it, directly in consequence of this am-
bitious expedition. The Empire had always wanted
a sufficient nucleus, and its powers were exhausted
by this unwise attempt to extend it.

On the whole then it may be said that India has
never really been united so as to form one state ex-
cept under the English. And they cannot be said to
have accomplished the work until the Governor-
Generalship of Lord Dalhousie thirty years ago,
when the Punjab, Oude, and Nagpore were incor-
porated with the English dominions.

Another leading element of nationality is a com-
mon religion. This element is certainly not altogether
wanting in India. The Brahminical system does
extend over the whole of India. Not of course that
it is the only religion of India. There are not less
than fifty millions of Mussulmans — that is, a far
greater number than is to be found in the Turkish
Empire. There is also a small number of Sikhs, who
profess a religion which is a sort of fusion of
Mohammedanism and Brahminism ; there are a few
Christians, and in Ceylon and Nepaul there are
Buddhists. But Brahminism remains the creed of
the enormous majority, and it has so much real
vitality that it has more than once resisted formidable
attacks. One of the most powerful of all proselytis-
ing creeds, Buddhism, sprang up in India itself; it
spread far and wide; we have evidence that it
flourished with vigour in India two centuries before
Christ, and that it was still flourishing in the seventh
century after Christ. Yet it has been conquered by

vr HOW WE GOVERN INDIA 261

Brahminism, and flourishes now almost in every part
of Asia more than in the country which produced it.
After this victory Brahminism had to resist the
assault of another powerful aggressive religion, before
which Zoroastrianism had already fallen, and even
Christianity had in the East had to retreat some
steps, Mohammedanism. Here again it held its own ;
Mussulman Governments overspread India, but they
could not convert the people.

Now religion seems to me to be the strongest and
most important of all the elements which go to
constitute nationality; and this element exists in
India When it is said that India is to be compared
rather to Europe than to France or England, we may
remember that Europe, considered as Christendom,
has had and still has a certain unity, which would
show itself plainly and quickly enough if Europe
were threatened, as more than once it was threatened
in the Middle Ages, by a barbarian and heathen
enemy. It may seem then that in Brahminism
India has a germ, out of which sooner or later an
•Indian nationality might spring. And perhaps it is
so ; but yet we are to observe that in that case the
nationality ought to have developed itself long since.
For the Mussulman invasions, which have succeeded
each other through so many centuries, have supplied
precisely the pressure which was most likely to
favour the development of the germ. Why did
Brahminism content itself with holding its own
against Islam, and not rouse and unite India against
the invader? It never did so. Brahminical Powers

262 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

have risen in India. A chieftain named Sivaji arose
in the middle of the seventeenth century, and
possessing himself of one or two hill-forts in the
highlands behind Bombay, founded the Mahratta
Power. This was a truly Hindu organisation, and,
as its power increased, it fell more and more under
the control of the Brahmin caste. The decline of
the Mogul Empire favoured its advance, so that in
the middle of the eighteenth century the ramifications
of the Mahratta confederacy covered almost the whole
of India. It might appear that in this confederacy
there lay the nucleus of an Indian nationality, that
Brahminism was now about to do for the Hindus
what has been done for so many other races by their
religion. But nothing of the kind happened. Brah-
minism did not pass into patriotism. Perhaps its
facile comprehensiveness, making it in reality not a
religion but only a loose compromise between several
religions, has enfeebled it as a uniting principle. At
any rate it appears that in the Mahratta movement
there never was anything elevated or patriotic, but
that it continued from first to last to be an organisa-
tion of plunder.

There is then no Indian nationality, though there
are some germs out of which we can conceive an
Indian nationality developing itself. It is this fact,
and not some enormous superiority on the part of
the English race, that makes our Empire in India
possible. If there could arise in India a nationality-
movement similar to that which we witnessed in
Italy, the English Power could not even make the

IV HOW WE GOVERN INDIA 263

resistance that was made in Italy by Austria, but
must succumb at once. For what means can England
have, which is not even a military state, of resisting
the rebellion of two hundred and fifty millions of
subjects ? Do you say, as we conquered them before,
we could conquer them again 1 But I explained that
we did not conquer them. I showed you that of the
army which won our victories four-fifths consisted of
native troops. That we were able to hire these
native troops for service in India, was due to the fact
that the feeling of nationality had no existence there.
Now if the feeling of a common nationality began to
exist there only feebly, — if, without inspiring any
active desire to drive out the foreigner, it only
created a notion that it was shameful to assist him in
maintaining his dominion, — from that day almost our
Empire would cease to exist; for of the army by
which it is garrisoned two-thirds consist of native
soldiers. Imagine what an easy task the Italian
patriots would have had before them, if the Austrian
Government which they desired to expel had de-
pended not upon Austrian but upon Italian soldiers !
Let us suppose — not even that the native army
mutinied — but simply that a native army could not
any longer be levied. In a moment the impossibility
of holding India would become manifest to us ; for
it is a condition of our Indian Empire that it should
be held without any great effort. As it was acquired
without much effort on the part of the English state,
it must be retained in the same way. We are not
prepared to bury millions upon millions or army

264 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

upon army in defending our acquisition. The
moment India began really to show herself what we
so idly imagine her to be, a conquered nation, that
moment we should recognise perforce the impossi-
bility of retaining her.

And thus the mystic halo of marvel and miracle
which has gathered round this Empire disappears
before a fixed scrutiny. It disappears when we
perceive that, though we are foreign rulers in India,
we are not conquerors resting on superior force, when
we recognise that it is a mere European prejudice
to assume that since we do not rule by the will
of the people of India, we must needs rule against
their will. The love of independence presupposes
political consciousness. Where this is wanting, a
foreign Government will be regarded passively, and
such a Government may continue for a long time and
prosper without exerting any extraordinary skill.
Such a passive feeling towards Government becomes
inveterate in a country that has been frequently con-
quered. Governments most oppressive have often
continued for centuries, and that though they had no
means of resisting rebellion if it should arise, simply
because it did not enter into the habits of the people
to rebel, because they were accustomed to obedience.
Read the history of the Russian Czars in the sixteenth
century. Why did a great population submit to the
furious caprices of Ivan the Terrible '\ The answer
is plain. They had been trampled under foot for two
centuries by the Tartars, and during that period they
had acquired the habit of passive submission.

VT HOW WE GOVERN INDIA 265

Now ought we not to expect the population of
India to be in a similar condition of feeling? Of
liberty, of popular institutions, there exists scarcely
a trace in the whole extent of Indian history or
tradition. The Italians had the Eoman Republic
behind them, and it was by reading Livy to the
people that Ribnzi roused them to rebellion. No
Indian demagogue could find anything similar to read
to the people. And for seven hundred years when
the English arrived, thej^ had been governed not
only by despots but by foreign despots. It would be
marvellous indeed if in such a country the feeling
could have sprung up that Government exists for
and depends on the people, if a habit of criticis-
ing Government, of meditating its overthrow, or of
organising opposition against it, could have sprung up.
Nations have, as it were, very stiff joints. They do
not easily learn a new kind of movement ; they do
what their fathers did, even when they fancy them-
selves most original. It has been pointed out that
even the French Revolution strangely resembled some
earlier chapters in the history of France. Certainly
the Italian nationality-movement resembles earlier
Italian movements that go back beyond the age of
Dante. Now by this rule we should expect to find
the Indian population silently submitting to whatever
Government had the possession of power, even though
it were foreign, as our Government is, and even
though it were savagely oppressive, which we think
our Government is not.

Our Government of India would be a miracle on

266 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

two conditions. First, if the Hindus had been accus-
tomed to be ruled only by their own countrymen,
and were familiar with the idea of resisting authority.
This is not the case of the Hindus, and accordingly
they submit, as throughout history vast populations
have been in the habit of submitting to Governments
which they could easily overthrow, as the Chinese at
the present day submit to a Tartar domination, as
the Hindus themselves submitted to the Mogul
domination before the English came. Indeed this
example of the Moguls is well adapted to show that
our ascendency over the Hindus is no proof of any
supernatural statesmanship in us. For one cannot
read the Mogul history without being struck with
the very same fact which surprises us in the history
of the English rule, viz. that the Moguls too con-
quered almost without apparent means. Baber, the
founder of the Empire, did not come with a mighty
nation at his back, or leaning on the organisation of
some powerful state. He had inherited a small
Tartar kingdom in Central Asia, but he had lost this
by an invasion of Osbegs. He wandered for a while
as a homeless adventurer, and then got possession of
another small kingdom in Afghanistan. Nothing
could be slighter than this first germ of empire.
This Tartar adventurer ruling Afghans in Cabul
founded an Empire which in about seventy years
extended over half India, and in a hundred years
more extended nominally at least over the whole.
I do not say that the Mogul Empire was ever
comparable for greatness or solidity to that which we

IV HOW WE GOVERN INDIA 267

have established, but like our own, even more than
our own, it seems built up without hands. The
Company had at least English money, English military
science, and the immortality of a corporation. Baber
and his successors had none of these resources. It is
difficult to discover any causes which favoured the
growth of their Empire. All we can say is that
Central Asia swarmed with a wandering population
much inclined to the vocation of mercenary soldiers,
which passed very readily for pay and plunder into
the service of the ruler of Cabul.

Secondly, our rule would be wonderful if the two
hundred million Hindus had the habit of thinking all
together, like a single nation. If not, there is nothing
wonderful in it. A mere mass of individuals, uncon-
nected with each other by any common feelings or
interests, is easily subjected, because they may be
induced to act against each other. Now I have
pointed out how weak and insufficient are the bonds
which unite the Hindus. If you wish to see how
this want of internal union has operated in favour of
our rule, you have only to read the history of the
great Mutiny. It may have occurred to you when I
said that a mutiny or even less than a mutiny on the
part of our native troops would be instantly fatal to
our Empire, that just such a mutiny actually happened
in 1857, and yet that our Empire still flourishes.
But you are to observe that I spoke of a mutiny
caused by a nationality-movement spreading among
the people and at last gaining the army. The mutiny
of 1857 was not of this kind. It began in the army

268 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.

and was regarded passively by the people ; it was
provoked by definite military grievances, and not by
any disafi"ection caused by the feeling of nationality
against our Government as foreign. But now let us
ask ; in what way was this mutiny, when once it had
broken out, put down 1 I am afraid the only opinion
that has ever obtained in England has been that it
was crushed by the prodigious heroism of the English
and their infinite superiority to the Hindus. Let me
read you the account which Colonel Chesney gives of
the matter in his Indian Polity, After remarking
that an intensely strong espit de corps had sprung up
in the Bengal Army — for observe that the Bombay
and Madras armies were very slightly concerned in the
mutiny — an esprit de corps which was purely military
and actually opposed to the feeling of nationality,
since it welded together the Hindu and the Mussul-
man elements (so that Colonel Chesney remarks : " In
ill-discipline, bitterness of feeling against their masters,
and confidence in their power to overthrow them,
there was nothing to choose between Hindu or
Mussulman "), he goes on to point out by what
counter-movement this movement was met. "For-
tunately the so-called Bengal Presidency was not
garrisoned wholly by the regular army. Four
battalions of Goorkhas, inhabitants of the Nepalese
Himalaya, who had been kept aloof from the rest of
the army, and had not imbibed the class-feeling which
animated that body, with one exception stood loyal ;
the conspicuous gallantry and devotedness to the
British cause displayed by one of these regiments

IV HOW WE GOVERN INDIA 269

especially won the admiration of their English com-
rades. Two extra-regiments of the line, which had
been recruited from the Punjab and its neighbourhood,
also stood firm. But the great help came from the
Punjab Irregular Force, as it was termed — a force,
however, which was organised on quite as methodical
and regular a footing, was quite as well-drilled and
vastly better disciplined, than the regular army.
This force consisted of six regiments of infantry and
five of cavalry, to which may be added four regiments
of Sikh local infantry, usually stationed in the Punjab.
These troops were directly under the orders of the
Government of that province, and not subject to that
centralised system of administration which had a
share in undermining the discipline of the regular
army. It was with these troops and the handful of
Europeans quartered in the upper part of India that
the rebellion was first met. Meanwhile the sympathies
of the people of the Punjab were enlisted on behalf
of their rulers. A lately-conquered people, whose
accustomed occupation had been superseded by the
disbandment of their army, they entertained no good-
will to the Hindustani garrisons which occupied their
country, and welcomed with alacrity the appeal to
arms made them to join in the overthrow of their
hereditary enemies. Any number of men that could
be required was forthcoming, and the levies thus
raised were pushed down to the seat of war as fast
as they could be equipped and drilled. And on the
reorganisation of the Bengal army these Punjab levies
have formed a large component part of it."

270 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

You see, the mutiny was in a great measure put
down by turning the races of India against each
other. So long as this can be done, and so long as
the population have not formed the habit of criti-
cising their Government, whatever it be, and of
rebelling against it, the government of India from
England is possible, and there is nothing miraculous
about it. But, as I said, if this state of things should
alter, if by any process the population should be
welded into a single nationality, if our relation to it
should come to resemble even distantly the relation
of Austria to Italy, then I do not say we ought to
begin to fear for our dominion ; I say we ought to
cease at once to hope for it. I do not imagine
that the danger we have to apprehend is that of a
popular insurrection. In some of the alarmist litera-
ture, for instance, in Mr. Elliot's book entitled,
Concerning John's Indian Affairs, I find harrowing
pictures of the misery of the poor ryot, and then the
conclusion drawn as a matter of course that this
misery must lead to an explosion of despair, by
which we shall be expelled. Whether the descrip-
tions are true this is not the place to inquire ; but
granting the truth of them for argument's sake, I do
not find in history that revolutions are caused in this
way. I find great populations cowering in abject
misery for centuries together, but they do not rise in
rebellion; no, if they cannot live they die, and if
they can only just live, then they just live, their
sensibilities dulled and their very wishes crushed out
by want. A population that rebels is a population

IV HOW WE GOVEKN INDIA 271

that is looking up, that has begun to hope and to
feel its strength. But if such a rising took place, it
would be put down by the native soldiery so long as
they have not learned to feel themselves brothers to
the Hindu and foreigners to the Englishman that
commands them. But on the other hand if this
feeling ever does spring up, if India does begin to
breathe as a single national whole — and our own rule
is perhaps doing more than ever was done by former
Governments to make this possible — then no such
explosion of despair, even if there were cause for it,
would be needed. For in that case the feeling would
soon gain the native army, and on the native anny
ultimately we depend. We could subdue the mutiny
of 1857, formidable as it was, because it spread
through only a part of the army, because the people
did not actively sympathise with it, and because it
was possible to find native Indian races who would
fight on our side. But the moment a mutiny is but
threatened which shall be no mere mutiny, but the
expression of a universal feeling of nationality, at
that moment all hope is at an end, as all desire ought
to be at an end, of preserving our Empire. For we
are not really conquerors of India, and we cannot
rule her as conquerors ; if we undertook to do so, it
is not necessary to inquire whether we could succeed,
for we should assuredly be ruined financially by the
mere attempt.

LECTURE V

MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA

In the last two lectures I was engaged in showing
that the conquest of India and the government of it
by the English have in a certain sense nothing
wonderful about them. We may fairly be proud of
many particular deeds done by our countrymen in
India, and of many men who in India have shown a
rare energy and talent for government, but it is a
mistake to suppose that the Empire itself is a stand-
ing proof of some vast superiority in the English
race over the races of India. Without assuming any
such vast superiority we are able to assign causes,
which are sufficient to account alike for the growth
and for the continuance of that Empire. It is not
then wonderful, if by wonderful be meant simply
miraculous, or difficult to account for by ordinary
causation.

Nevertheless there is a sense in which it is not
only wonderful, but far more wonderful than is
commonly understood. It is wonderful rather in its

V MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA 273

consequences than in its causes. In other words, it
is great in the peculiarly historical sense, for the
pregnancy of events, as we remarked, is what gives
them historical rank. By applying this test we
raised the rank of several events in English history,
especially the American Eevolution, which for want
of dramatic or romantic interest are too little studied.
Let us now remark that the Indian Empire, however
it may seem less marvellous on close examination
than at jfirst sight, will be found to gain in historic
interest, as much as it loses in romantic.

A vast Oriental Empire is not necessarily at all an
interesting or a particularly important thing. There
have been many such Empires in Asia, which historic-
ally are less important than a single Greek or Tuscan
city-republic. That they have been of wide extent,
or even of long duration, does not make them inter-
esting. Generally when we examine them we find
that they are of a low organisation, and that under
their weight the individual is crushed, so that he
enjoys no happiness, makes no progress, and pro-
duces nothing memorable. And perhaps when first
we turn our thoughts towards our Indian Empire,
we may receive the impression that it is not intrins-
ically more interesting than the average of such
overgrown Asiatic despotisms. We trust indeed
that, thanks to the control of English public opinion,
it may stand at a higher level of intelligence,
morality, and philanthropy than the Mogul Empire
which it has succeeded. But at best we think of it
as a good specimen of a bad political system. We

T

274 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

are not disposed to be proud of the succession of the
Great Mogul. We doubt whether with all the merits
of our administration the subjects of it are happy.
We may even doubt whether our rule is preparing
them for a happier condition, whether it may not be
sinking them lower in misery, and we have our
misgivings that perhaps a genuine Asiatic Govern-
ment, and still more a national Government springing
up out of the Hindu population itself, might in the
long run be more beneficial because more congenial,
though perhaps less civilised, than such a foreign
unsympathetic government as our own.

But let us consider that it is not quite every
Empire which is thus uninteresting. The Roman
Empire for example is not so. I may say this now
without fear, because our views of history have
grown considerably less exclusive of late years.
There was a time no doubt when even the Roman
Empire, because it was despotic and in some periods
unhappy and half-barbarous, was thought uninterest-
ing. A generation ago it was the reigning opinion
that there is nothing good in politics but liberty, and
that accordingly in history all those periods are to be
passed over and, as it were, cancelled, in which
liberty is not to be found. Along with this opinion
there prevailed a habit of reading history, as we read
poetry, only for an exalted kind of pleasure, and this
habit led us, whenever we came to a period in which
there was nothing glorious or admirable, to shut the
book. In those days no doubt the Roman Empire
too was condemned. The Roman Republic was held

V MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA 275

in honour for its freedom ; the earlier Eoman Empire
was studied for the traces of freedom still discernible
in it. But we used to shut the book at the end of
the second century, as if all that followed for some
ten centuries were decay and ruin ; and we did not
take up the story again with any satisfaction until
the traces of liberty began to reappear in England
and in the Italian republics. I suppose I may say
that this way of regarding history is now obsolete.
We do not now read it simply for pleasure, but in
order that we may discover the laws of political
growth and change, and therefore we hardly stop to
inquire whether the period before us is glorious or
dismal It is enough if it is instructive and teaches
lessons not to be learned from other periods. We
have also learnt that there are many other good
things in politics besides liberty ; for instance there
is nationality, there is civilisation. Now it often
happens that a Government which allows no liberty
is nevertheless most valuable and most favourable to
progress towards these other goals. Hence the
Eoman Empire — not only in its beginnings but in its
later developments up to the thirteenth century — is
now regarded, in spite of all the barbarism, all the
superstition, and all the misery, as one of the most
interesting of all historical phenomena. For it is
perceived that this Empire is by no means without
internal progress, without creative ideas, or without
memorable results. We discern in it the embryo of
that which is greatest and most wonderful, namely,
the modern brotherhood or loose federation of

276 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

civilised nations. And therefore, though it was a
great Empire, and though it was despotically governed,
it is studied with infinite curiosity and attention.

This difference between the Roman Empire and
other Empires founded on conquest, arises from the
superiority in civilisation of the conquerors to the
conquered. A great conquering race is' not usually
advanced in civilisation. The typical conqueror is
some Cyrus or Zinghis Khan— that is, the chieftain of
a hardy tribe, which has been steeled by poverty and
is tempted by plunder. Before such an assailant the
advanced civilisation is apt to go down, so that in
history we see civilisation often conquered, sometimes
holding its ground, but not very often making great
conquests, until in recent times the progress of inven-
tion strengthened it by giving it new weapons. The
great conquering race of history has been one of the
least progressive, the Turcomans. It was from this
race mainly, from the hive of tribesmen, who in
Central Asia furnished mercenary armies to all the
ambitious kings of Asia, that Baber and Akber drew
the force with which they conquered India. Such is
the ordinary rule, but when an exceptional case does
occur, when high civilisation is spread by conquest
over populations less advanced, the Empire thus
formed has a very peculiar interest. Of such a
nature for instance was the conquest of the East
by Alexander the Great, because the Macedonians
through their close relationship with the Greeks
brought all Hellenism in their train. Accordingly,
though the kingdoms of the Diadochi were in them-

V MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA 277

selves but military despotisms of a low type, yet the
strangest and most memorable effects were produced
by the fusion of Greek with Oriental thought. Still
more remarkable, because it lasted much longer and
because it is much better known, was the effect pro-
duced upon the nations of Europe by the Eoman
Empire. In fact this great phenomenon stands out
in the very centre of human history, and may be
called the foundation of the present civilisation of
mankind.

Now it will make all the difference if the English
conquest of India is to be classed along with the
Greek conquest of the East and the Roman conquest
of Gaul and Spain, and not along with those of the
Great Turk and the Great Mogul. If it belongs to
the latter class, we shall not be misled by any mere
splendour or magnitude, but shall pronounce it to be
a phenomenon of secondary interest, belonging to the
history of barbarism rather than to that of civilisa-
tion. But if it belongs to the former, we shall be
prepared to place it among the transcendent events
of the world, those events which rise as high above
the average of civilised history as an ordinary
Oriental conquest falls below it.

There need be no question about the general fact
that the ruling race in British India has a higher and
more vigorous civilisation than the native races. We
may say this without taking too much to ourselves.
The English, as such, are perhaps not a race of
Hellenic intelligence or genius, but the civilisation
they iahciit is not simply their own. It is European

278 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

civilisation, the product of the united labour of the
European races held together and animated by the
spirit of the ancient world. What do we see on the
other side? What estimate shall we form of the
native civilisation of India ?

As I have said so often, India is not one country,
and therefore it has not one civilisation. It has not
even so much unity as it seems to have, for Brahmin-
ism by its peculiar trick of absorption and assimila-
tion has brought together under one name forms of
civilisation which are really diverse. If we look
below the surface, we find two distinct layers of
population, a fair-skinned and a dark-skinned race.
The two layers are visible almost everywhere ; the
dark layer preponderates in the South; it is out-
numbered but clearly visible in Bengal ; it is evanes-
cent perhaps higher up the Ganges ; but that the two
races did really blend almost all over India appears
from the fact that no language is now spoken which is
a mere corruption or dialect of Sanscrit, as French
and Italian are dialects of Latin. Every Hindi
language, even when its vocabulary is most ex-
clusively Sanscrit, has inflections and forms which are
non-Aryan.^ Now in estimating the civilisation of
India we must begin by taking account of this funda-
mental distinction of race. The dark-skinned race is
in many parts not civilised, and ought to be classed as
barbarous. Mr. B. H. Hodgson says, "In every
extensive jungly or hilly tract throughout the vast
continent of India there exist hundreds of thousands
* Stated on the authority of Professor Cowell.

,v MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA 279

of human beings in a state not materially different
from that of the Germans as described by Tacitus."

We are to distinguish again between the Hindu
races proper and the great Mussulman immigration.
There are not less than fifty millions of Mussulmans
in India, and of these a large proportion consists of
Afghans or Pathans, Arabs, Persians, and Turco-
mans or Tartars who have at difTerent times entered
India either with, or in order to join, the armies of
the Mussulman conquerors. Here we may expect to
find, as everywhere in the Mussulman world, a sort
of semi-civilisation, certain strong virtues but of a
primitive kind ; in short an equipment of ideas
and views not sufficient for the modern forms of
society.

Then finally we come to the characteristically
Indian population, the Aryan race which descended
from the Punjab with the Sanscrit language on its
lips, which spread itself mainly along the valley of
the Ganges, but succeeded in spreading its peculiar
theocratic system over the whole of India. Perhaps
no race has shown a greater aptitude for civilisation.
Even its barbarism, as reflected in the Vedic liter-
ature, is humane and intelligent. And after its
settlement in India it advanced normally along the
path of civilisation. Its customs grew into laws, and
■were consolidated in codes. It imagined the division
of labour. It created poetry and philosophy and the
beginnings of science. Out of its bosom sprang a
mighty religious reform called Buddhism, which
remains to this day one of the leading religious

280 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

systems of the world. So far then it resembled those
gifted races which created our own civilisation.

But the Aryan race did not make so much pro-
gress in India as in Europe. As it showed in India
an extreme incapacity for writing history, so that no
record of it remains except where it came in contact
with Greek or Mussulman invaders, we can only con-
jecture the causes that may have retarded its pro-
gress. But the great religious reform after some
centuries of success for some reason or other failed ;
Buddhism was expelled. The tyranny of the priestly
caste was firmly established. No great and solid
political system grew up ; there was little city-civil-
isation. And then came the scourge of foreign
conquest.

Subjection for a long time to a foreign yoke is one
of the most potent causes of national deterioration.
And the few facts we know about the ancient Hindus
confirm what we should conjecture about the moral
effects produced upon them by their misfortunes.-'
We have in the Greek writer Arrian a description of
the Indian character, which we read with surprise.
He says, "They are remarkably brave, superior in
war to all Asiatics ; they are remarkable for simplicity
and integrity ; so reasonable as never to have recourse
to a lawsuit and so honest as neither to require locks
to their doors nor writings to bind their agreements.
No Indian was ever known to tell an untruth."

^ See this subject treated at much greater length by Professor
Max-Miillcr in his recently published volume, U7m< can India
teach icst

V MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA 281

This description has no doubt an air of exaggeration
about it, but, as Elphinstone remarks, it shows that
an extraordinary change has passed over the Hindu
character since it was written. Exaggeration consists
in exhibiting the real features larger than they ought
to be. But this description exhibits on an unnatural
scale precisely the features that are wanting in the
modern Hindu character. Modern travellers there-
fore are found to exaggerate the very opposite
features. They accuse the Hindu of want of veracity,
want of valour, and extreme litigiousness. But the
change is precisely such as might naturally be pro-
duced by a long period of submission to the foreigner.
On the whole then we find in India three stages
of civilisation — first, that of the hill-tribes, which is
barbarism, then that which is perhaps sufficiently
described as the Mussulman stage, and thirdly, the
arrested and half-crushed civilisation of a gifted race,
but a race which has from the beginning been in a
remarkable manner isolated from the ruling and
progressive civilisation of the world. Whatever this
race achieved it achieved a long time ago. Its great
epic poems, which some would compare to the greatest
poems of the West, are ancient, though perhaps much
less ancient than has been thought, so too its systems
of philosophy, its scientific grammar. The country
has achieved nothing in modern times. It may be
compared to Europe, as Europe would have been if
after the irruption of barbarians and the f.ill of ancient
civilisation it had witnessed no revival, and had not
been able to protect itself against the Tait;ir invasions

282 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

of the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Let us suppose
Europe to have vegetated up to the present time in
the condition in which the tenth century saw it,
exposed to periodical invasions from Asia, wanting in
strongly marked nations and vigorous states, its
languages mere vernaculars not used for the purposes
of literature, all its wisdom enshrined in a dead
language and doled out to the people by an imperious
priesthood, all its wisdom too many centuries old,
sacred texts of Aristotle, the Vulgate, and the Fathers,
to which nothing could be added but in the way of
commentary. Such seems to be the condition of the
Aryans of India, a condition which has no resemblance
whatever to barbarism, but resembles strikingly the
medieval phase of the civilisation of the West.

The dominion of Eome over the western races was
the empire of civilisation over barbarism. Among
Gauls and Iberians Rome stood as a beacon-light ;
they acknowledged its brightness, and felt grateful
for the illumination they received from it. The
dominion of England in India is rather the empire of
the modern world over the medieval. The light we
bring is not less real, but it is probably less attractive
and received with less gratitude. It is not a glorious
light shining in darkness, but a somewhat cold day-
light introduced into the midst of a warm gorgeous
twilight.

Many travellers have said that the learned Hindu,
even when he acknowledges our power and makes
use of our railways, is so far from regarding us with
reverence that he very sincerely despises us. This

V MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA 283

is only natural We are not cleverer than the Hindu ;
our minds are not richer or larger than his. We
cannot astonish him, as we astonish the barbarian,
by putting before him ideas that he never dreamed
of. He can match from his poetry our sublimest
thoughts ; even our science perhaps has few concep-
tions that are altogether novel to him. Our boast is
not that we have more ideas or more brilliant ideas,
but that our ideas are better tested and sounder. The
greatness of modern, as compared with medieval or
ancient, civilisation is that it possesses a larger stock
of demonstrated truth, and therefore infinitely more of
practical power. But the poetical or mystic philoso-
pher is by no means disposed to regard demonstrated
truth with reverence ; he is rather apt to call it
shallow, and to sneer at its practical triumphs, while
he revels for his part in reverie and the luxury of
unbounded speculation.

We in Europe however are pretty well agreed that
the treasure of truth which forms the nucleus of the
civilisation of the West is incomparably more sterling
not only than the Brahminic mysticism with which it
has to contend, but even than that Roman enlighten-
ment which the old Empire transmitted to the nations
of Europe. And therefore we shall hold that the
spectacle now presented by India of a superior
civilisation introduced by a conquering race is equal
in interest and importance to that which the Koman
Empire presented. Moreover the experiment is tried
on a scale equally large. This Empire is usually
judged by its immediate effect on the welfare of the

284 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot,

inhabitants. It has removed evils of long standing,
says one ; it has introduced new evils, says another.
This whole controversy puts on one side the most
characteristic work of our Empire, which is the
introduction in the midst of Brahminism of European
views of the Universe. No experiment equally
interesting is now being tried on the surface of the
globe. And when we consider how seldom it is put
in the power of a nation to accomplish a task so
memorable, we shall learn to take an eager interest in
the progress of the experiment, and to check the
despondency which might lead us to ask what profit
accrues to ourselves from all this labour that we have
undertaken under the sun.

And now let us take note of a great advantage
which we enjoy in working at this task. It comes to
light when we compare our Empire v/ith the Roman.
Rome was placed in the midst of its Empire, was
subject to an overwhelming reaction from it, and
was exposed to all the dangers which threatened it.
England on the other hand is singularly disengaged
from this enormous Empire which it governs, and
feels but a slight reaction from it.

Every historical student knows that it was the
incubus of the Empire which destroyed liberty at
Rome. Those old civic institutions, which had nursed
Roman greatness and to which Rome owed all the
civilisation which she was to transmit to the countries
of the West, had to be given up as a condition of
transmitting it. She had to adopt an organisation
of, coujiJiiratively, a low type. Her civilisation,

V MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA 285

when she transmitted it, was already in decay. In a
great part of the Empire her very language was
worsted in the competition by the Greek, so that the
Emperor M. Aurelius himself writes his Meditations
in Greek. The Eoman religion instead of making
converts fell into neglect, and in the end gave way to
a religion which had sprung up in a distant province
of the Empire. There came a time when almost all
that was Roman in thought and feeling seemed to be
dead in the Empire of Rome, when its Emperors were
like Oriental kings and wore the diadem. We know
now that this was not so, and that Roman influence,
the Roman tradition, continued to sway the European
mind for many centuries. But this sway was exerted
secretly, through law and through Catholicism, at a
later time through the Renaissance in literature and
art. Think how different would have been the course
of modern European history if tlio mother-city of its
civilisation, instead of being in the midst of the
nations it educated, instead of suffering in their
discords and convulsions, instead of receiving as
much barbarism from them as it gave civilisation to
them, had stood outside, enjoying an independent
prosperity, developing its own civilisation further
with an unabated vigour of youth all the while that
it guided the subject nations.

The Roman Empire is in this respect a somewhat
extreme case, because the conquering Power was so
remarkably small compared to the empire it attached
to itself. The light radiated not from a country but
from a city, which was not so much a shining disk as

286 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

a point of intense light. The Roman Republic had
institutions which were essentially civic, and which
began to break down as soon as they were extended
even to the whole of Italy. But even where the
conquering Power has a much broader basis, it is
commonly altogether transformed by the effort of
conquest. The wars by which the conquest is made,
and then the establishments necessary to maintain
the conquest, call for a new system of government
and finance. Of all the unparalleled features which
the English Empire in India presents, not one is so
unique as the slightness of the machinery by which
it is united to England and the slightness of its
reaction upon England. How this peculiarity has
been caused I have already explained. I have shown
that our acquisition of India was made by a process
so peculiar that it cost us nothing. Had England as
a state undertaken to subvert the Empire of the
Great Mogul, she would have destroyed her own
constitution in the process, no less than Rome did
by the conquest of Europe. For she would evidently
have been compelled to convert herself into a military
state of the most absolute type. But as England has
merely inherited the throne which was founded in
India by certain Englishmen who rose to the head of
affairs in time of anarchy, she has been but very
slightly disturbed in her domestic affairs by this
acquisition. It has modified no doubt, as I have said,
her foreign policy in a great degree, but it has
produced no change in the internal character of the
English state. In this respect India has produced a.s

V MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA 287

little effect upon England as those Continental States
which have been in modern times connected with
England in what is called a personal union, Hannover
under the Georges, or Holland under William HI.
The consequence is that in this instance the operation
of the higher civilisation on the lower is likely to be
far more energetic and continuous than in those
ancient examples of the Roman Empire or the Greek-
Empire in the East. In those cases the lower civilisa-
tion killed the higher in the same moment that
the higher raised the lower towards its own level.
Hellenism covered the East, but the greatness of
Greece came to an end. All nations crowded into
the Roman citizenship ; but what became of the
original Romans themselves 1 England on the other
hand is not weakened at all by the virtue that goes
out from her. She tries to raise India out of the
medieval into the modern phase, and in the task she
meets with difficulties and even incurs dangers, but
she incurs no risk whatever of being drawn down by
India towards the lower level, or even of being
checked for a moment in her natural development.

This has been the result ; but for a long time it
was uncertain that the result would be such. In the
history of British India there are two most interest-
ing chapters — I should say that in the whole history
of the world there are no chapters more instructive —
in which we learn, first, how a mischievous reaction
from India upon England was prevented ; secondly,
how European civilisation was, after much delay and
hesitation, resolutely brought to bear upon India

288 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

The first chapter embraces chronologically the first
half of George IIL's reign, that stormy period of
transition in English history when at the same time
America was lost and India won. It covers the two
great careers of Olive and Hastings, and the end of
the struggle is marked by the reign of Lord Corn-
wallis, which began in 1785. The second chapter
•embraces about the first forty years of the present
century, and the crowning point of this development is
the Governor-Generalship of Lord William Bentinck.
For in the Indian Empire Lord Cornwallis and Lord
W. Bentinck have been the two great legislators after
Hastings, as Lord "Wellesley, Lord Hastings and
Lord Dalhousie have been, after Clive, the great
conquerors, and when we consider, as we are doing
now, the progress of civilisation in the Empire, the
great legislators naturally demand our attention
most.

First then let us consider the reaction which at
the beginning India threatened to have upon England,
and how this danger was averted. The literature of
the seventies and the eighties of the eighteenth
century is full of that alarm which found its strongest
expression in the speeches of Burke against Warren
Hastings. England had taken a sudden plunge into
the unknown abyss of Hindu politics. Englishmen
were becoming finance ministers or commanders of
mercenary troops to Mussulman Nawabs, and were
bringing back to England the plunder of the Mogul
Empire, acquired no one knew how. There were two
dangers here — first, lest the English character should

V MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA 289

be corrupted, for those who take the most favourable
view of the Hindu character would admit that Hindu
politics in the last century were unspeakably corrupt ;
secondly, lest the wealthy adventurers, returning to
England and entering into English political life with
ideas formed in Asia, should upset the balance of
the constitution. This was particularly to be feared
under the old electoral system, which allowed so
many seats in Parliament to be put up to sale.
Moreover in an age when Government derived its
chief power from patronage, there was a danger lest
one of the contending parties should make a snatch
at the vast patronage of India, a prize which, whether
it fell to the King or to the Whig party, would
probably make its possessor supreme in the State.

To give you a specimen of the fears which were
entertained by leading men, I will read a passage
from William Pitt's motion for parliamentary reform
made in 1782. He said, "Our laws have with a
jealous care provided that no foreigner shall give a
single vote for a representative in Parliament ; and
yet we now see foreign princes not giving votes but
purchasing seats in this House, and sending their
agents to sit with us as representatives of the nation.
No man can doubt what I allude to. We have
sitting among us the members of the Rajah of Tan-
jore and the Nawab of Arcot, the representatives of
petty Eastern despots ; and this is notorious, publicly
talked of and heard with indifference; our shame
stalks abroad in the open face of day, it is become
too common even to excite surprise. We treat it as
U

290 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

a matter of small importance that some of the electors
of Great Britain have added treason to their corrup-
tion and have traitorously sold their votes to foreign
Powers; that some of the members of our Senate
are at the command of a distant tyrant ; that our
Senators are no longer the representatives of British
virtue but of the vices and pollutions of the East."

The great incidents of this struggle are, the fall
of the Coalition Ministry on the India Bill of Fox
and the passing of the India Bill of Pitt, the trial of
Warren Hastings, the succession of Lord Cornwallis
to the Governor-Generalship, and the administrative
reform carried out by him in India. I merely touch
these great occurrences to mark their significance
and to show what results flowed from them. If I
went into detail, I might show that much was un-
reasonable in the clamour raised against the India
Bill of Fox, and that there was much unreasonable
violence in the attacks made upon Hastings. I might
also criticise the double system introduced by the
India Bill of Pitt. But, taking a broad view, it must
be said that the particular dangers feared were very
successfully averted, that Lord Cornwallis established
a title to gratitude and Edmund Burke to immortal
glory. For the stain of immorality did pass away
as by magic from the administration of the Company
under the rule of Lord Cornwallis, a lesson never to
be forgotten was taught to Governors -General, and
at the same time the political danger from the con-
nection with India passed away.

England had broken the toils that threatened to

V MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA 291

imprison her. But liow far was she, who had so
stoutly refused to be influenced by India, entitled to
influence India in her turn 1 We could not fail to see
the enormous difference between our civilisation and
that of India ; we could not fail on the whole greatly
to prefer our own. But had we any right to impose
our views upon the natives? We had our own
Christianity, our own views of philosophy, of history
and science ; but were we not bound by a sort of
tacit contract with the natives to hold all these things
officially in abeyance 1 This was the view which was
taken at first. It was not admitted that England
was to play the part of Eome to her empire ; no ;
she was to put her civilisation on one side and govern
according to Indian ideas. This view was the more
winning as the new and mysterious world of Sanscrit
learning was revealing itself to those first generations
of Anglo-Indians. They were under the charm of a
remote philosophy and a fantastic history. They
were, as it was said, Brahminised, and would not
hear of admitting into their enchanted Oriental en-
closure either the Christianity or any of the learning
of the West.

I have not space left in this lecture to do more
than indicate how we were gradually led to give up
this view and to stand out boldly as teachers and
civilisers. The change began in 1813, when, on the
renewal of the Company's charter, a sum was directed
to be appropriated to the revival of learning and the
introduction of useful arts and sciences. Over this
enactment an Education Committee wrangled for

292 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

twenty years. Were we to use our own judgments,
or were we to understand learning and science in the
Oriental sense 1 Were we to teach Sanscrit and
Arabic, or English 1

Never on this earth was a more momentous ques-
tion discussed. Under Lord William Bentinck in
1835 the discussion came to a head, and by a re-
markable coincidence a famous man was on the spot
to give lustre to and take lustre from a memorable
controversy. It was Macaulay's Minute that decided
the question in favour of English. In that Minute
or in Sir C. Trevelyan's volume on Education in
India you can study it. Only remark a strange
oversight that was made. The question was dis-
cussed as if the choice lay between teaching Sanscrit
and Arabic on the one hand, or English on the other.
All these languages alike are to the mass of the
population utterly strange. Arabic and English are
foreign, and Sanscrit is to the Hindus what Latin is
to the natives of Europe. It is the original language
out of which the principal spoken languages have
been formed, but it is dead. It has been dead a far
longer time than Latin, for it had ceased to be a
spoken language in the third century before Christ.
By far the greater part of the famous Sanscrit poems
and writings, philosophical or theological, were
written artificially and by a learned efi'ort, like the
Latin poems of Vida and Sannazaro. Now over
Sanscrit Macaulay had an easy victory, for he had
only to show that English had poetry at least aa
good, and philosophy, history, and science a great deal

V MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF ENGLAND AND INDIA 293

better. But why should there be no choice but
between dead languages? Could Macaulay really
fancy it possible to teach two hundred and fifty
millions of Asiatics Enghsh 1 Probably not, probably
he thought only of creating a small learned class. I
imagine too that his own classical training had
implanted in his mind a fixed assumption that a dead
language is necessary to education. But if India is
really to be enlightened, evidently it must be through
the medium neither of Sanscrit nor of English, but of
the vernaculars — that is, Hindustani, Hindi, Bengali,
etc. These, under some vague impression that they
were too rude to be made the vehicles of science or
philosophy, Macaulay almost refuses to consider, but
against these his arguments in favour of English
would have been powerless.

But though this great oversight was made — it has
since been remarked and, since the education despatch
of Sir Charles Wood in 1854, in some measure
repaired — the decision to which Macaulay's Minute
led remains the great landmark in the history of our
Empire, considered as an institute of civilisation. It
marks the moment when we deliberately recognised
that a function had devolved on us in Asia similar to
that which Eome fulfilled in Europe, the greatest
function which any Government can ever be called
upon to discharge.

LECTURE VI

PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA

The sum of what I have laid before you up to this
point is that in India a result has been produced by
causes less wonderful than is commonly supposed,
which result is in magnitude more wonderful, and in
the consequences which may possibly flow from it far
more wonderful and great, than is imagined. But in
showing how such a result could be produced without
a miracle I have laid stress upon another peculiarity
of this Empire, which is of fundamental importance,
namely the slightness of the machinery which con-
nects it with England. Let us now remark that in
this respect our Indian Empire resembles our colonies.
There is of course this vast difference, that our chief
colonies determine in most matters their own policy
through Governments which spring up by a constitu-
tional process out of the colonial assembly, and that
India has no such independent initiative, the Viceroy
himself being liable to be overruled by the Indian
Secretary at home. But at the same time there is

LECT. VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 295

this great resemblance, that India, like the colonies,
has been held at arm's length, that its Government
has never been suffered to approach the Home
Government so closely as to blend with it, or to
modify its character, or to hamper its independent
development. India is both constitutionally and
financially an independent Empire. If the Empire
of the Great Mogul had continued in its original
vigour up to the present time, no doubt in foreign
affairs the history of England would differ consider-
ably from what it is. Several of our wars with
France would have taken a different turn, especially
that war of which the Egyptian expedition of Bona-
parte was a main incident. We can imagine too
that the Crimean War would not have happened,
and that we should not have taken the interest we
did in the recent Eusso-Turkish war. But the con-
stitution of the English state would have been
precisely what it is, and our domestic history would
have run almost exactly the same course. Only
once, I think, namely in 1783, has India come quite
into the foreground of parliamentary debate and
absorbed the attention of the political world. Even
in the Mutiny of 1857, deeply as our feelings were
stirred, the course of home politics was not aflFectcd
by the affairs of India.

Accordingly if the Indian Empire were lost, the
immediate and purely political effects of the change
would not be great. A Secretaryship of State avouUI
disappear ; the work of Parliament would be lightened.
Our foreign policy would be relieved of a great

296 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

burden of anxiety. Otherwise little would immedi-
ately be changed. In this respect I say the Indian
Empire resembles the colonies, and we are led to
perceive a universal characteristic of that expansion
of England which is the subject of these lectures. I
have remarked before that this expansion does not
seem at first sight to be of the nature of organic
growth. When the boy expands into the man, the
boy disappears. He does not increase hy an accretion
visibly different from the original boy and attached
to him so as to be easily peeled off. But it is in
such a way that England seems to have increased.
For the original England remains distinctly visible at
the heart of Greater Britain, she still forms a distinct
organism complete in herself, and she has not even
formed the habit of thinking of her colonies and her
Indian Empire along with herself.

Turgot compared colonies to fruit which hangs on
the tree only till it is ripe. And indeed it might
seem natural to picture the aggregate of English
communities rather as a family than as an individual.
We may say that the England of Queen Elizabeth's
time has now a large family scattered over distant
seas, that this family consists for the most part of
thriving colonies, but that it includes also a corpor-
ation which had the good luck in the course of its
trade to become ruler of a vast country. There is
no objection to such an image, provided it is regarded
only as an image, and is not converted by sleight of
hand into an argument. But we know that a family,
at least in the present state of society, is always

VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 297

tending towards practical dissolution. It is a close
union so long as the children are young ; it becomes
a federation, and at last a loose federation, as they
grow up ; finally, in the present state of society, as
the grown-up sons disperse or emigrate in quest of a
livelihood and the daughters are married, it often
ceases practically to be a federation or even a perma-
nent alliance. Now we may call our Empire a
family, but we must not without further investi-
gation assume that it will have the fate which cannot
even be said generally to attend literal families, but
which attends them in the very peculiar form of
society in which we happen to live. The dissolving
causes which act upon families do not act in an equal
degree upon states, and, what is especially to be
observed, they do not act upon them nearly so much as
they used to do. In the time of Turgot and of the
American Revolution there was much force in the
comparison between a distant dependency and a son
who had left home and so practically passed out of
the family. But there is much less force in it at the
present day, when inventions have drawn the whole
globe close together, and a new form of state on a
larger scale than was known in former ages has
appeared in Russia and the United States.

This consideration should make us hesitate in
drawing the obvious coiiclusion from the great fact
that the connection of. England with her colonies and
her Indian Empire has been all along so remarkably
slight. Above I pointed out with respect to the
colonies that, though their connection with the

298 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

mother-country was loose at the outset, so that the
secession of the American colonies was a natural
effect of the causes then in operation, yet the connec-
tion does not steadily grow slighter and slighter, but
on the contrary increases and becomes closer. The
colonies have practically approached much nearer
to us, all that was invidious in the old colonial
system has been repealed, and they have now
become a natural outlet for a superfluous popula-
tion, whereas in the old time, when there was as
yet no surplus population, they were peopled
principally by discontented refugees, who bore a
grudge against the country they had left. A
similar law governs our connection with India,
The machinery by which the connection is main-
tained is slight. England has not allowed herself to
be hampered by her relation to India. Enormous as
the dominion is, England remains Avhat she was
before she acquired it, so that, as I have said, the
connection could be broken any day, though it has
lasted a hundred years, without any violent wrench
or any dislocation in our domestic system. But if it
be inferred from this that a connection so slight must
sooner or later snap, before we can admit such an
inference we must consider another question. In
which direction is the tendency? Does the slight
connection grow looser and looser, or does it on the
other hand tighten with time 1 And here again, as-
in the case of the colonies, we shall find that the
general tendency of our age, which brings together
what is remote and which favours large political

VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 299

unions, operates to strengthen rather than to weaken
the connection between England and India.

Macculloch, in the Note on India in his edition of
Adam Smith, speaks of the trade between England
and India about 1811 — that is, in the days of the
monopoly — as being utterly insignificant, of little
more importance than that between England and
Jersey or the Isle of Man. Now if trade be one of
the principal bonds which unite communities together,
we shall have some criterion of the tendency, and of
the strength of the tendency, whether towards union
or towards separation, between England and India, by
comparing the present with the former state of the
trade between the two countries. It was supposed in
old times that the Hindus had unaltetable habits, and
therefore that they would never become consumers of
European produce. But now instead of Jersey or the
Isle of Man we compare our trade with India to that
with the United States and France — that is, with the
greatest commercial communities — and we find that
though indeed we receive from India much less than
from them (thirty-two millions, as against thirty-nine
from France and not less than a hundred and three
from America in 1881), yet India comes next to them
as an exporting country, and on the other hand
India heads Franco and all other nations except the
United States as an importer from England, for she
took in the same year twenty-nine millions, whereas
the countries which came next — that is, Australia
and Germany — took twenty -one and seventeen re-
spectively.

300 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND i.ect.

Now here is a prodigious advance which has been
made in the present century, and it measures, you
will observe, the gradual approach of the two popula-
tions towards each other, not their gradual separation
from each other. And thus, though politically the
direct effects of disruption would not be great,
economically they would be enormous. For we are to
remember that it is owing to the political connection
between the two countries that this commercial inter-
course has been allowed to exist, and that it would
cease perhaps if India became independent, and
certainly if she passed into the hands of another
European Power such as Russia. At the beginning
of the century indeed we might have severed our-
selves from India with little anxiety, and those
struggles with France about our commercial factories
at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta may seem to have
had no sufficient motive, since the trade carried on at
those stations was but insignificant. It is no longer
so; the commercial stake we have in India is now
very large — that is, we are more closely bound to
India than we were. Look again at the moral
approach that England has made towards India
during the same time. Originally we had no sort
of interest in the affairs of the Hindus among whom
we had stationed commercial agencies. The Mogul
Empire or the dissolution of the Mogul Empire did
not concern us. It was no affair of ours whether the
Hindus had a bad Government, or had no Govern-
ment at all and were merely the prey of armed
plunderers. Even when we began to conquer them,

VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 301

it was not on their account but partly to resist the
French, partly to protect our factories from sudden
attack. For a long time after the Company had
become a sovereign Power, this indifference on our
part to the welfare of the natives continued. Adam
Smith, writing in the eighties or about the end of
the reign of Warren Hastings, says that there never
was a Government so wholly indifferent to the wel-
fare of its subjects. This was only the natural conse-
quence of the false position in which a trading
company suddenly turned into a Government found
itself. The anomaly and the effect of it could not
but last as long as the Company. But since 1858 it
has been removed. The very appearance of a selfish
object is gone. The Government is now as sincerely
paternal as any Government can be, and, as I ex-
plained, it has abandoned the affectation of not impart-
ing the superior enlightenment we know ourselves to
possess on the ground that the Hindus do not want it.
At the same time the introduction of the tele-
graph and the shortening of the voyage to India,
first by the overland route and since by the Suez
Canal, has brought India much more within reach of
England. It has often been contended that the
effect of this change is bad, that the constant inter-
ference of Downing Street and still more of English
public opinion is mischievous. Let this be granted
for argument's sake. Whether it be desirable or
undesirable that India should be more closely united
with England, is not now the question. What con-
cerns us at present is the fact that, for good or for

302 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

evil, the connection of England with India does not
diminish but increases.

Once more, let us remark the speed with which
our intercourse with India increases. Mr. Cunning-
ham in his volume lately published, entitled British
India and its Rulers, compares the increase of the
foreign trade of India between 1820 and 1880 with
that of the foreign trade of Great Britain itself in
the same period. This last increase has often excited
astonishment : English foreign trade rose from about
80 to about 650 millions sterling. But Mr. Cunning-
ham points out that the increase of Indian trade in
the same period has been even greater, and, as of
course the foreign trade of India is principally with
England, it follows that the tendency to commercial
union between the two countries is prodigiously strong,
so that fifty years hence, if no catastrophe takes
place, the union will be infinitely closer than it is now.

If we combine all the facts I have hitherto ad-
duced in order to form a conception of our Indian
Empire the result is very singular. An Empire
similar to that of Rome, in which we hold the
position not merely of a ruling but of an educating
and civilising race (and thus, as in the marriage of
Faust with Helen of Greece, one age is married to
another, the modern European to the medieval
Asiatic spirit) ; this Empire held at arm's length,
paying no tribute to us, yet costing nothing except
through the burden it imposes on our foreign policy,
and neither modifying nor perceptibly influencing
our busy domestic politics ; this Empire nevertheless

TI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 303

held firmly and with a grasp which does not slacken
but visibly tightens ; the union of England and India,
ill-assorted and unnatural as it might seem to be,
nevertheless groAving closer and closer with great
rapidity under the influence of the modern condi-
tions of the world, which seem favourable to vaot
political unions ; all this makes up the strangest,
most curious, and perhaps most instructive chapter of
English history. It has been made the subject of
much empty boasting, while those who have looked
deeper have often been disposed to regard the whole
enterprise with despondency, as a kind of romantic
adventure which can lead to nothing permanent.
But, as time passes, it rather appears that we are in
the hands of a Providence which is greater that all
statesmanship, that this fabric so blindly piled up
has a chance of becoming a part of the permanent
edifice of civilisation, and that the Indian achieve-
ment of England as it is the strangest, may after all
turn out to be the greatest, of all her achievements.

At this point again we are led to turn our eyes
from the present to the past, and to inquire how it
could happen to us to undertake such an enterprise.
I devoted a lecture to the historical question by what
force we were able to subdue the people of India
to our government; but this question is different.
That was the question, how 1 this is the question,
why 1 We see that without any supernatural force
or genius it was possible to raise such an Empire, but
what was the motive which impelled us to do it?
How many lives, some of them noble and heroic,

304 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

many of them most laborious, have been spent in
piling up this structure of empire ! Why did they
do it ? Or if they themselves looked no further than
their instructions, what was the motive of the
authority that gave them their instructions ? If this
was the Company, why did the Company desire to
conquer India, and what could they gain by doing so 1
If it was the English Government, what could be its
object, and how could it justify such an undertaking
to Parliament 1 We may have been at times too war-
like, but the principal wars we have waged have borne
the appearance at least of being defensive. Naked
conquest for its own sake has never had attractions
for us. What then did we propose to ourselves 1

The English Government assuredly has gained
nothing through this acquisition, for if it has not
hampered their budgets by the expense of con-
quest, on the other band it has not lightened them
by any tribute. If we hope to discover the guilty
party by the old plan of asking Cui bono 1 that is,
Who profited by it? the answer must be, English
commerce has profited by it. We have here a great
foreign trade, which may grow to be enormous, and
this trade is secured to us so long as we are masters
of the Government of India. Here no doubt is a
substantial acquisition, which stands us in good stead
now that we find by experience how tenacious of pro-
tection foreign Governments are. May it then be
assumed that this trade has been our sole object all
along ?

The hypothesis is plausible, and it is made more

VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 305

plausible still when we remark that our Empire began
evidently in commerce. To defend our factories and
for no other purpose we took arms in the first
instance. Our first wars in India, as they belong to
the same time, so belong evidently to the same class,
as our colonial wars with France. They were pro-
duced by the same great cause on which I have
insisted so much, the competition of the Western
states for the wealth of the regions discovered in the
fifteenth century. We had trade-settlements in India
as we had trade-settlements in America. In both
countries we encountered the same rivals, the French.
In both countries English and French traders shook
their fists at each other from rival commercial stations.
In America our New England and Virginia stood
opposed to their Acadie and Canada ; and similarly
our Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay stood opposed
in India to their Pondicherry, Chandernagore, and
Mahee.

The crisis came in America and India at once
between 1740 and 1760, when in two wars divided
by a very hollow and imperfect peace these two
states struggled for supremacy, and in both quarters
England was victorious. From victory over France
in India we proceeded without a pause to empire
over the Hindus. This fact, combined with the
other fact, equally striking, of the great trade which
now exists between England and India, leads very
naturally to a theory that our Indian Empire has
grown up from first to last out of the spirit of trade.
We may imagine that after having estabhshed our
X

306 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

settlements on the coast and defended these settle-
ments both from the native Powers and from the
envy of the French, we then conceived the ambition
of extending our commerce further inland ; that
perhaps we met with new states, such as Mysore or
the Mahratta Confederacy, which at first were un-
willing to trade with us, but that in our eager avarice
we had recourse to force, let loose our armies upon
them, broke down their custom-houses and flooded
their territories in turn with our commodities ; that
in this way we gradually advanced our Indian trade,
which at first was insignificant, until it became con-
siderable, and at last, when we had not only intimi-
dated but actually overthrown every great nativa
Government, when there was no longer any Great
Mogul, or any Sultan of Mysore, or any Peishwa of
the Mahrattas, or any Nawab Vizir of Oude, or any
Maharajah and Khalsa of the Sikhs, then, all
restraints having been removed, our trade became
enormous.

But it will be found on closer examination that
the facts do not answer to this theory. True it is
that our Empire began in trade, and that lately there
has been an enormous development of trade. But the
course of affairs in history is not necessarily a straight
line, so that when any two points in it are determined
its whole course is known. The truth is that if the
spirit of English trade had been thus irrepressible and
bent upon overcoming all the obstacles which lay in
its path, it would not have raised wars in India, for
the main obstacle was not there. The main obstacle

VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 307

to English trade was not the jealousy of native
Princes, but the jealousy of the East India Company
itself. Accordingly there has been no correspondence
in time between the increase of trade and the advance
of conquest.

Our trade on the contrary continued to be in-
significant in spite of all our conquests until about
1813, and it began to advance with great rapidity
soon after 1830. These dates point to the true cause
of progress in trade, and they show that it is wholly
independent of progress in conquest, for they are the
dates of the successive Acts of Parliament by which
the Company was deprived of its monopoly. Thus
it appears that, while it was by the East India
Company that India was conquered, it was not by
the East India Company, but rather by the de-
struction of the East India Company, that the great
trade with India was brought into existence. Our
conquests in India were made by an exclusive
chartered Company, but our Indian trade did not
greatly prosper until that Company ceased practically
to exist.

In order to make this clearer, it will be convenient
here to give such an outline of the history of the East
India Company as may mark the principal stages of
its progress and those alone. The East India Com-
pany then came into existence in the year 1600 —
that is, near the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign. In
the view we are now taking of the expansion of
England it deserves note that this occurrence took
place just at that time and at no time either earlier

308 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

or later. England, we have seen, assumed its
modern — that is, its maritime and oceanic — character
about the time of the Spanish Armada, since it was
then that its first race of naval heroes appeared, and
then too that it made its first attempts to colonise
America. If this general statement be true, we
ought to look in this period also for our first settle-
ments in India. Just in this period we find them,
for the creation of the East India Company took
place twelve years after the defeat of the Armada.

It was created for trade, and it remained devoted
to trade for a hundred and forty-eight years. During
this period several important occurrences in its
history took place, but none so important as to
deserve our attention here. It was in 1748 that the
disturbances occurred in the Deccan which forced the
Company to undertake on a considerable scale the
functions of government and war. Then began its
second and memorable period, which is nearly as
long as the first ; it embraces a hundred and ten years
and ends with the abolition of the Company by Act
of Parliament in 1858. It is this second period alone
with which we are concerned at present. In order
to understand the course of development, we must
endeavour to subdivide it.

It happens accidentally that there is a certain
regularity in the course of events over a great part
of this period, which rarely occurs in history and
which is very helpful to the memory. The Company
being dependent on Parliament for a renewal of its
Charter, and its affairs having since 1748 taken such

VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 309

a strange turn, it was natural that Parliament should
grant the renewal only for a definite term, and at the
end of the term should reconsider the condition of
the Company and make alterations in its organisa-
tion. In this way the Company became subject to a
transformation, which was strictly periodic and re-
curred at absolutely equal intervals. These intervals
were of the length of twenty years, beginning with
Lord North's Regulating Act in 1773. If then we
bear this date in mind, we acquire at the same time
four other dates which of necessity are of primary
importance in the history of the Company. These
are 1793, 1813, 1833, and 1853.

We shall find these five dates quite as important
as we might expect, and they form a very convenient
framework for the history of the Company. The
first is one of the most important of all. If 1748
marks the beginning of the movement which led to
the creation of British India, 1773 may be said to
mark the creation itself of British India. In that
year began the line of Governors-General, though for
a long time they had not the title of Governor-
General of India but only of Bengal ; then too was
founded the Supreme Court of Calcutta. The
enormous danger which attended the new state of
our Indian affairs was at the same time met, and the
root of corruption cut through, by the abolition of
the power in the Company's affairs of the share-
holders or so-called Proprietors.

The next renewal in 1793 is less important,
though the debates which then took place are

310 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

interesting now for the picture they present of the
phase of Anglo-Indian life when it was hrahminised,
when the attempt was made to keep India as a
kind of inviolate paradise, into which no European
and especially no missionary should be suffered to
penetrate. But the date 1793 is itself as important
as any other, being the date not merely of a renewal
of the Charter, but also of the famous Permanent
Settlement of Bengal, one of the most memorable
acts of legislation in the history of the world.

It was at the next renewal in 1813 that the aged
Warren Hastings, then in his eightieth year, came
from his retirement to give evidence before the
House of Commons. This date marks the moment
when the monopoly begins to crumble away, when
the brahminical period comes to an end, and England
prepares to pour the civilisation, Christianity, and
science of the West into India.

In 1833 the monopoly disappears, and the
Company may perhaps be said practically to have
ceased to exist. Henceforward it is little more than
a convenient organisation, convenient because of the
tradition it represents and the experience which it
guards, by means of which India is governed from
England. At this time too the systematic legislative
labours of our Indian Government begin.

Finally 1853 is the date of the introduction of the
system of appointment by competition. That old
question which had convulsed England in 1783 and
which statesmen had been afraid to touch since, the
question who should have the patronage of India or

VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 311

how it should be dispensed without shaking the
constitution of England, was in this way solved.

But here we are reminded that history cannot for
a very long time proceed in this regular manner, so
convenient to our memories. The convulsion of
1857 put a final end to this periodicity, and 1873,
the centenary of the Regulating Act, is no great
Indian date.

It appears from this outline that 1813 is the
year when the monopoly was first seriously curtailed
and 1833 the year when it was destroyed. Now
Macculloch when he speaks of the utter insignificance
of our old trade with India has before him the
statistics up to the year 1811, and the statistics which
show so vast an increase in the modern trade
refer to the years after 1813, and especially to those
after 1833. In other words, so long as India was in
the hands of those whose object was trade, the trade
remained insignificant; the trade became great and
at last enormous, when India began to be governed
for itself and trade-considerations to be disregarded.
This might seem a paradox, did Ave not remember
that in dismissing trade-considerations we also de-
stroyed a monopoly. But there is nothing wonderful
in the fact that an exclusive Company, even when its
first object is trade, carries on trade languidly,
nothing wonderful in a vast trade springing up as
soon as the shackles of monopoly were removed.

On the other hand we do not find that the increase
of trade corresponds at all to the augmentation of
our territorial possessions in India.

312 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lkct.

There have been four great rulers in India to
whom the German title of Mehrer des Eeichs or
Increaser of the Empire might be given. These
are Lord Olive, the founder, Lord Wellesley, Lord
Hastings, and Lord Dalhousie. Roughly it may be
said that the first established us along the Eastern
Coast from Calcutta to Madras ; the second and
third overthrew the Mahratta power and established
us as lords of the middle of the country and of the
Western side of the peninsula ; and the fourth, be-
sides consolidating these conquests, gave us the
north-west and carried our frontier to the Indus.
There were considerable intervals between these
conquests, and accordingly they fall into separate
groups. Thus there was a period of conquest be-
tween 1748 and 1765, which we may label with the
name of Clive, a second period beginning in 1798,
which may be said to have lasted, though with a
long pause, till about 1820 ; this period may bear the
names of Wellesley and Lord Hastings ; and a third
period of war between 1839 and 1850, but of this the
first part was unfortunate, and only the second part
led to conquests, of which it fell to Lord Dalhousie
to reap the harvest.

Now there was no correspondence whatever in
time between these territorial advances and the
advance of trade. Thus we remarked how insignifi-
cant the trade of India still was in 1811, and yet
this was shortly after the vast annexations of Lord
Wellesley. On the other hand trade took a great
leap about 1830, and this is one of the peaceful in-

VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 313

tervals of the history. About the time of the mutiny
annexation almost ceased, and yet the quarter
of a century in which no conquests have been made
has been a period of the most rapid gi-owth in trade.

And thus the assertion which is often made, and
which seems to be suggested by a rapid survey of the
history — the assertion namely that the Empire is the
mere result of a reckless pursuit of trade — proves to
be as untrue as the other assertion sometimes made,
that it is the result of a reckless spirit of military
aggression.

Our first step to empire was very plainly taken
with a view simply of defending our factories. The
Madras Presidency grew out of an effort, which, in
the first instance, was quite necessary, to protect Fort
St. George and Fort St. David from the French.
The Bengal Presidency grew in a similar way out of
the evident necessity of protecting Fort William
and punishing the Mussulman Nawab of Bengal,
Surajah Dowlah, for his atrocity of the Black Hole.

So far then the causation is clear. In the period
which immediately followed, the revolutionar}' and
corrupt period of British India, it is undeniable that
we were hurried on by mere rapacity. The violent
proceedings of Warren Hastings at Benares, in Oude,
and Rohilcund, were of the nature of money-specula-
tions. If the later history of British India had been
of the same kind, our Empire might fairly be said to
be similar to the Empire of the Spanish in Hispaniola
and Peru, and to have sprung entirely out of the
reckless pursuit of gain.

314 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

But a change took place with the advent of Lord
Cornwallis in 1785. Partly by the example of his
high character, partly by a judicious reform, which
consisted in making the salaries of the servants of the
Company considerable enough to remove the excuse
for corruption, he purged the service of its immoral-
ity. From that time it has been morally respectable.
Now among the consequences of this change we
might expect, if gain were the principal inducement
to conquest, to see the aggressions of the Company
cease. For not only had its agents from this time a
character to lose, but it was also impossible for it to
engage in purely wicked enterprises of conquest,
since under the double government introduced by
Pitt in 1784 it would have had to make the English
Ministry its accomplice. Now the English Ministry
may be supposed capable of crimes of ambition, but
hardly of corrupt connivance at the sordid crimes of
a trading-company.

The truth is that from the time of Pitt's India
Bill the supreme management of Indian affairs passed
out of the hands of the Company. Thenceforward
therefore an enterprise begun for purposes of trade
fell under the management of men who had no
concern with trade. Thenceforward two English
statesmen divided between themselves the decision
of the leading Indian questions, the President of the
Board of Control and the Governor-General, and as
long as the Company lasted, the leading position
belonged rather to the Governor-General than to the
President of the Board. Now it was under this

VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 315

system that the conquest of India for the most part
was made, and it is certain that in this period
the spirit of trade did not preside over our Indian
affairs.

"With the appearance of Lord Wellesley as
Governor-General in 1798 a new era begins in Indian
policy. He first laid down the theory of intervention
and annexation. His theory was afterwards adopted
by Lord Hastings, who, by the way, before he be-
came Governor-General had opposed it. Later again
it was adopted with a kind of fanaticism by the last
of the Governors-General who ruled in the time of the
Company, Lord Dalhousie.

Now this is the theory which led to the conquest
of India. I have not left myself space in this lecture
to examine it. I can only say that it does not aim at
increase of trade, and that accordingly, instead of
being favoured, it was usually opposed by the Com-
pany. The Company resisted Lord "Wellesley and
censured Lord Hastings ; if they were strangely
compliant in dealing with Lord Dalhousie, it is to be
remarked that in his time the directors had practically
ceased to represent a trading Company. The theory
was often applied in a most high-handed manner.
Lord Dalhousie in particular stands out in history
as a ruler of the type of Frederick the Great, and did
deeds which are almost as difficult to justify as the
seizure of Silesia or the Partition of Poland. But
these acts, if crimes, are crimes of the same order
as those of Frederick, crimes of ambition and of an
ambition not by any means purely selfish. Neither

316 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect. vi

he nor any of the great Governors-General since
Warren Hastings can be suspected for a moment of
sordid rapacity, and thus we see that our Indian
Empire, though it began in trade and has a great
trade for one of its results, yet was not really planned
by tradesmen or for purposes of trade.

LECTURE VII

INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGERS

For estimating the stability of an Empire there are
certain plain tests which the political student ought
to have at his fingers' ends. Of these some are
applied to its internal organisation, and some to its
external conditions, just as an insurance company in
estimating the value of a life will take the opinion of
the medical oflBcer, who will feel the candidate's
pulse and listen to his heart, but they will also
inquire how and where the candidate lives, and
whether his pursuits or habits expose him to any
peculiar risks from without. Now I have partly
applied the internal test. The internal test of the
vitality of a state consists in ascertaining whether or
no the Government rests upon a solid basis. For in
every state besides the two things which are obvious
to all, viz. the Government and the governed, there
is a third thing, which is overlooked by most of
us, and yet is usually not difficult to distinguish, — I
mean the power outside the Government which holds
the Government up. This power may be slight or

318t EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

it may be substantial, and according to its solidity,
or rather according to the ratio of its strength
to that of the powers which tend to overthrow
the Government, is that Government's chance of
duration. Now I made some inquiry into the
strength of the supports upon which the Government
in India rests, but rather with a view of explaining
how it stands now than whether it is likely to last
a long time. Let us reconsider then with this
other object the conclusions at which we arrived.

We found that the Government did not rest, as
in England, upon the consent of the people or of
some native constituency, which has created the
Government by a constitutional process. The Gov-
ernment is in every respect, race, religion, habits,
foreign to the people. There is only one body of
persons of which we can positively afl&rm that
without its support the Government could not stand ;
this is the army. Of this army one part is English,
and might be trusted to stand by the Government in
all circumstances, but it is less than a third part of
the whole. The other two-thirds are bound to us by
nothing but their pay and the feeling of honour
which impels a good soldier to be true to his flag.
This is our visible support. Is there beyond it any
moral support which, though invisible, may be
reckoned upon as substantial? Here is a question
which affords room for much difference of opinion.
We are naturally inclined to presume that the bene-
fits we have done the country by terminating the
chronic anarchy which a century ago was tearing it

VII INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGERS 319

in pieces, and by introducing so many evident im-
provements, must have convinced all classes that our
Government ought to be supported. But such a
presumption is very rash. The notion of a piiblic
good, of a commonweal, to which all private interests
ought to be subordinate, is one which we have no
right to assume to be current in such a population
as that of India. It seems indeed to presuppose
precisely what we have found to be wanting — that is,
a moral unity or nationality in India. This being
absent, we ought to presume that, instead of consid-
ering what benefits our rule may confer upon the
country in general, each class or interest inquires
how it separately is affected by our ascendency, the
Mussulman how his religion, the Brahmin how his
ancient social supremacy, the native prince how his
dignity, is aflfected by it. The great benefit which
we have conferred upon the country at large in
putting down general plunder and the omnipotence
of a mercenary soldiery, is enjoyed perhaps mainly
by a class which, though the most numerous, yet has
little influence and a short memory, — that class so
characteristic of India, the small cultivators whose
thoughts are absolutely wrapt up in the difficult
problem of existing, Avhose utmost ambition extends
only to keeping body and soul together. Those who
used to be plundered, tortured, massacred in the
chronic wars, ought no doubt to bless us; but the
plunderers, the murderers are not likely to do so ;
and these, it may be, form the more influential class.
It is certain in fact that all those who under the old

320 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.

rule of the Moguls used to be influential in India,
those who used to monopolise ofl&cial posts, those
who belong to the race which used to rule and
represent the religion which used to dominate, — all
those therefore whose opinion of us might be expected
to be politically important, — have suffered by our
ascendency ; and that all our philanthropic attempts
to raise the native races have had the effect of de-
pressing them, and that to such an extent that vast
numbers of them have been reduced to the greatest
distress. The subject has been discussed in Dr.
Hunter's book on the Mussulmans of India. In
these circumstances it would be very rash to assume
that any gratitude, which may have been aroused
here and there by our administration, can be more
than sufficient to counterbalance the discontent which
we have excited among those whom we have ousted
from authority and influence.

It remains then that our power rests on an army,
and on an army of which two-thirds are in relation
to us mere mercenaries. This may seem a slight
support, especially for so vast an authority, but we
are to consider on the other hand what is the force
of opposition which has to be overcome. And we
find a population which by habit and long tradition
is absolutely passive, which has been dragonnaded
by foreign military Governments, until the very
conception of resistance has been lost. We find also
a population which has no sort of unity, in which
nationalities lie in layers, one under another, and
languages wholly unlike each other are brought

VII INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGERS 321

together by composite dialects caused by fusion. In
other words it is a population which for the present
is wholly incapable of any common action. As I
said, if it had a spark of that corporate life which
distinguishes a nation, it could not be held in such a
grasp as we lay upon it. But there is no immediate
prospect of such a corporate life springing up in it.
In the meanwhile our Government seems in ordinary
times sufficiently supported. It is considerably
stronger in many respects than it was at the time of
the mutiny. The proportion of English to native
troops in the army is larger, and many precautions
suggested by the mutiny itself have been taken. A
mutiny might happen again, but so long as it is a
mere mutiny there seems no reason why it should be
fatal to our power. The native troops want native
leadership, and so long as they find no efi"ective
support in the people, so long as their own objects
continue to be, as they were in the last mutiny,
wholly unpatriotic and selfish, so long as they can be
disbanded and replaced by another native army, the
position looked at purely from within seems tolerably
secure. But this statement at the same time brings
to light certain dangers. In the first place, what is
said of the passive habits of the native population
applies only to the Hindus. The Mussulmans have
in great part difi"erent habits and different traditions.
They do not look back upon centuries of submission,
but upon a period not so long past when they were
a ruling race. Secondly we are to remember that,
much as unity may be wanting, one kind of unity,

Y

322 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

that of religion, is not wanting. There is the
powerful and active unity of Islam ; there is the less
active but still real unity of Brahminism. In Dr.
Hunter's book on the Indian Mussulmans there is a
chapter entitled "the chronic conspiracy within our
territory," in which is described the religious agitation
which, under the influence of Wahabite preachers,
constantly rouses against our Government (according
to Dr. Hunter, but others deny this) just that part
of the population which has the proudest memories,
and therefore the keenest sense of indignation against
the race that has superseded them. Brahminism,
though a tenacious, is a much less inspiring religion.
Still we all remember the greased cartridges. The
mutiny of 1857, though mainly military, yet had a
religious beginning. It shows us what we might ex-
pect if the vast Hindu population came to believe that
their religion was attacked. And we are to bear in
mind that the Hindu religion is not, like the Moham-
medan, outside the region which science claims as its
own. We liave always declared that we held sacred
the principle of religious toleration, and on that un-
derstanding we are obeyed ; but what if the Hindu
should come to regard the teaching of European
science as being of itself an attack on his religion t

Great religious movements then seem less im-
probable than a nationality-movement. On the other
hand the religious forces, if they are livelier,
neutralise each other more directly. Islam ;i,nd
Hinduism confront each other, the one stronger in
faith, the other in numbers, and create a sort of

VII INTEKNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGERS 323

equilibrium. Is it conceivable that we may some
day find our Christianity a reconciling element
between ourselves and these contending religions?
We are to remember that, as Islam is the crudest
expression of Semitic religion, Brahminism on the
other hand is an expression of Aryan thought.
Now among the religions of the world Christianity
stands out as a product of the fusion of Semitic with
Aryan ideas. It may be said that India and Europe
in respect of religion have both the same elements,
but that in India the elements have not blended,
while in Europe they have united in Christianity.
Judaism and classical Paganism were in Europe at
the beginning of our era what Mohammedanism and
Brahminism are now in India; but in India the
elements have remained separate, and have only
made occasional efforts to unite, as in the Sikh
religion and in the religion of Akber. In Europe a
great fusion took place by means of the Christian
Church, which fusion has throughout modern history
been growing more and more complete.

Such then is the appearance which our Empire
wears, when it is looked at by itself and with reference
only to the internal forces which play upon it in
India, But in order to form any estimate of its
chance of stability it is equally important to consider
what influences affect it from without.

Few countries known to history have been so
isolated as India. Between Nearchus, the Admiral of
Alexander, and Vasco da Gama no European com-
mander navigated the Indian Ocean, but the Arabs

324 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect,

appear to have made naval descents on Sind as early
as the time of the Caliph Omar. With this exception
the only traceable foreign relation of India, except
towards the North, has been with Java, and here the
influence went forth from India, for we find in the
Kawi language of Java the strongest traces both
linguistic and literary of Hindu influence. What
the sea is to the peninsula, that to the plain of the
Ganges is the enormous barrier of the Himalaya. It
has the effect of making India practically rather an
island than a peninsula. On this side too Indian
influence has gone forth into Central Asia, for it is to
the north and the east that Buddhism went forth to
make its extensive conquests. But on this side too
there have been no political relations, no wars or
invasions of which we have any authentic knowledge,
except at a single point.

We can easily imagine therefore that the isolation
of India was for thousands of years complete, and
indeed the natives told Alexander the Great, when he
appeared among them, that they had never been
invaded before.

But this isolation came to an end at last, because
after all India is not an island. It has one vulnerable
point. There is one point at which the mountain
barrier can be penetrated. It can be invaded from
Persia or from Central Asia through Afghanistan.
Accordingly the whole history of the foreign relations
of India up to the time of Vasco da Gama centres in
Afghanistan. We may reckon perhaps eight great
invasions by this route.

VII INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGERS 325

The first is the most memorable of all, but no
history of it remains. The Aryan race must have
entered by this route, or perhaps we may say that
the Aryan race must have come into existence here.
The Afghans themselves are Aryan by language, and
the correspondence in certain matters between the
Zendavesta of Persia and the Vedas of India leads
us to place the original Aryan home of the Sanscrit-
speaking race somewhere on the frontier of India and
Persia.

The next invasion was that of Alexander the
Great, famous enough in history, for it first threw
open the door of India to the Western world. But
it had no permanent consequences, since the Graeco-
Bactrian kingdom, which for a time maintained a
footing in India, came to an end in the second century
before Christ.

The third wants a history almost as much as the
first. It is the so-called Scythian invasion, or series
of invasions, of the first centuries after Christ. All-
important as it is to students of Sanscrit literature, it
need not detain us here.

Then comes the invasion of Mahmoud of Ghazni
(a.d. 1001). This is one of the most important,
because it is at once the end both of the isolation and
of the independence of India, and also what may be
called the practical discovery of India for the rest
of the world. Mahmoud is to India, as it were,
Columbus and Cortez in one. Since his time foreign
domination has never been interrupted, and the way
to India through the Khyber Pass has been a beaten

326 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

road trodden by many adventurers. In several
respects too Mahmoud is a precursor of the Great
Moguls. He is by birth a Turk, he has a petty
throne in Afghanistan, and he is irresistibly impelled
to the conquest of India by his Mussulman faith and
by the near neighbourhood of the shrines of idolatry.
In all these points he resembles Baber.

The fifth great invasion was that of Tamerlane in
1398. It was purely destructive, but has an import-
ance of its own, which however we shall understand
better when we are in a condition to compare it with
the seventh and eighth invasions.

Then comes the invasion of Baber in 1524 and the
establishment of the Mogul Empire. What Mahmoud
had begun he and his successors carried out with more
continuousness. Their empire was similar to the
Mussulman Empires which had preceded it, but
firmer and more consolidated.

The seventh and eighth are desolating incursions
like that of Tamerlane. The one was undertaken by
Nadir Shah, the tyrant who seized the throne of
Persia on the fall of the Sofi dynasty ; it took place
in 1739, when the Mogul Empire was already in full
decline. The other took place in 1760 ; the author
of it was Ahmed Shah Abdali, head of an Empire of
Duranis, whose headquarters were in Afghanistan.

Such are the principal invasions which India has
suffered. A review of them shows that, though
India has but this one point at which she is vulner-
able by land, yet at this point she is very vulnerable
indeed. For a long time indeed it seems that the

VII INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGERS 327

way to invade her was not discovered, but at least
from the time of Mahmond of Ghazni she has become
peculiarly liable to invasion, and her historj'^ has
been completely determined by it. For she has
shown extremely little power of resistance. The
history of India up to and outside of the English
conquest may be thus briefly summed up. It consists
in the first place of two great Mussulman conquests
and of a great Hindu reaction against the Mussulman
power, which took shape in the Mahratta confederacy ;
the two conquests were both made from Afghanistan ;
in the second place, of the destruction of the two
great Mohammedan Powers in succession and the
decisive humiliation of the Mahratta Power; this
was accomplished by three other invasions from
Afghanistan. That you may understand how this is
so I will ask you first to examine the fall of the
Mogul Empire — that is, the second of the great
Mussulman 'Powers. The ultimate cause of its fall
was perhaps the unwise attempt of Aurungzebe to
extend it over the Deccan ; accordingly its decline
began visibly at Aurungzebe's death. But the
decisive blow which was mortal to it, which converted
it from a sick man to a dying man, was the devastat-
ing invasion of Nadir Shah, who came down through
Afghanistan in 1739. He sacked Delhi, and so
completely plundered the treasury that the Mogul
Government was never able to raise its head again.
In precisely the same way the Mahratta Power, just
at the moment when it seemed on the point of
uniting all India, was broken by the descent of

328 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

Ahmed Shah Abdali from Afghanistan and by the
fatal battle of Paniput (in which 200,000 men are
said to have fallen) in the year 1761 — that is, when
the English were already making themselves masters
of Bengal. And it appears to me that, as these two
invasions were fatal to the Moguls and the Mahrattas,
so the earlier invasion of Tamerlane at the end of the
fourteenth century crushed the earlier Mussulman
Power, which just before under Mohammed Toghlak
had reached its greatest extension.

But now, as Mahmoud of Ghazni threw open
India to invasion from the north, Vasco da Gama
opened it to maritime invasion from Europe. This
was, though it did not seem so at the time, the
greater achievement of the two. For Mahmoud only
established a connection between India and the
Mussulman world of Western and Central Asia, but
Vasco da Gama for the first time since Alexander the
Great connected it with Europe, and this time it was
Europe christianised and civilised. This could not
be remarked at the time because, while Mahmoud
came as a mighty conqueror, Vasco da Gama was but a
humble navigator. His discovery for a very long time
led to no political results. There followed a century
which I called the Spanish-Portuguese age of colonial
history. Almost throughout the sixteenth century
the whole newly-discovered oceanic world was in the
hands of two nations, and the Asiatic half of it
almost exclusively in the hands of the Portuguese.
But in the last years of that century the Dutch
succeeded in taking their place. As to the English,

vn INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGERS 329

when the seventeenth century opened, they were still
but timid interlopers encroaching a little in India
upon the monopoly of the Dutch.

I explained above how at the end of the seven-
teenth century England and France had begun to
take in the colonial world the position which had
belonged in the sixteenth century to Spain and
Portugal, and how the whole eighteenth century is
filled with the struggle of these two nations for
supremacy in it. In 1748 this struggle breaks out
violently in India, and it has already become clear to
Dupleix that the struggle is political, not merely
commercial, and that the prize is nothing less than an
Indian Empire. Here then is a momentous turning
point in the history of Indian foreign relations.
Hitherto she had been connected with the outer
world only through Afghanistan ; henceforth she is
to be connected with it also by the sea.

This new connection, once established, for a time
eclipses the old, especially in the eyes of the English
conquerors themselves. As I have said before, the
enemy whom the English for a long time continued
to dread most in India was their earliest enemy,
France. Invasions from Afghanistan had not indeed
ceased. Nadir Shah's invasion took place only nine
years before that year 1748, from which we date the
rise of the British Empire. The invasion of Ahmed
Shah Abdali took place thirteen years later. But
these occurrences did not much attract the attention
of the English. For we are to bear in mind that,
though they had begun to conquer, they did not yet

330 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

dream how far their conquests would carry them.
Because they Avere now firmly planted as territorial
rulers in the neighbourhood of Fort St. George and
Fort William, they did not as a matter of course
think themselves responsible for all India, or study
comprehensively the relations of the country con-
sidered as a whole to the outer world. The affairs of
Afghanistan or the Punjab seemed almost as much
beyond their horizon as those of the Turkish Empire.
But towards the end of the eighteenth century a
change took place in the view of the English.
Hitherto they had looked most anxiously towards
Madras and the Deccan. Their main fear was lest
the French might make some new alliance with one
of the native princes of the South, might help him
with arms and officers or with a fleet, while he
descended upon Madras. This was what actually
took place in that war with France which grew out
of the American Eevolution, and never perhaps were
we so hard pressed in India. Hyder Ali descended
upon the Carnatic to the gates of Madras, and from
the sea the greatest of all French sailors, the Bailli
de Suffren, co-operated with him. But fifteen years
later the whole face of our foreign relations in
India was changed by Bonaparte's Egyptian expedi-
tion. French policy here took a new direction. It
did not indeed break off from its old connections in
the Deccan. Tippoo was expected to be as useful to
the Directory as his father Hyder had been to Louis
XVI. But at the same time Bonaparte's occupation
of Egypt and his campaign in Syria, movements

vu INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGERS 331

whicli were avowedly aimed at England, seemed to
show that he had conceived the design of attacking
our power in India from the north. Then for the
first time we remembered Nadir Shah and Ahmed
Shah Abdali ; then for the first time we began to
look anxiously, as we have so often looked since,
towards the Khyber Pass, towards Zemaun Shah, who
at the end of the eighteenth century sat in the seat
of Ahmed Shah at Cabul, and towards the Court of
Persia.

This then is the second great phase of the foreign
policy of our Indian Empire. It is marked by the
celebrated mission of Malcolm (afterward Sir John)
to the Persian Court in 1800. Never before had we
had occasion to study what I may call the balance of
Asia, or to inquire quid Tiridaien terreat, what thoughts
agitate the mind of the Persian king. But observe it
is not the secret influence of Russia that is feared,
but that of France. I said before that perhaps the
Duke of Wellington considered himself to be fight-
ing the French at Assaye, not less than at Waterloo.
In like manner you will find that Malcolm in his
Persian negotiations has Napoleon and the power of
France, not at all that of Russia, in his mind.

But in this second phase, though we have begun
to look towards Afghanistan, we have not ceased to
be afraid, as in the first phase, of French influence in
the South. The life of this same Sir John Malcolm
illustrates this. He was selected for the Persian
mission on account of the distinction he had won just
before in the war against Tippoo Sultan of Mysore.

332 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

Now this is a war against the French almost as truly
as that earlier war in which Clive first distinguished
himself. Tippoo himself was understood to be hand-
and-glove with the Directory : Bonaparte is his ally,
as Suffren had been his father's. The French called
him Citoyen Tipou. And what is the Nizam doing 1
It was with the Government of the Nizam at Hydera-
bad that the French had had their earliest connection
half a century before. They knew even better than
the English how to conquer India, and that the secret
lay in training sepoys and putting them under
European leadership. We find that now in 1798
there is in the Hyderabad country a force of 14,000
men, who are disciplined and commanded by French
officers. A certain Raymond is in command of them,
and we read in Kaye's Life of Malcolm that " assign-
ments of territory had been made by the Nizam for
the pay of these troops. Foundries were established
under competent European superintendence. Guns
were cast. Muskets were manufactured. Admirably
equipped and disciplined, Raymond's levies went out
to battle with the colours of Revolutionary France
floating above them and the cap of liberty engraved
on their buttons." Now so long as our nominal
ally the Nizam supported such a force and Tippoo
was avowedly in concert with France, our position in
the Deccan was not so materially changed from what
it had been when our Indian quarrel with France
first began. It was still possible that the tables
might be turned on the English in 1798 by Ray-
mond's force, as they had been turned on the French

vn INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGERS 333

before by Clive at Arcot. At this juncture the
young Malcolm was sent to Hyderabad, and he
succeeded in disbanding this French force, or, as he
himself calls it, "expelling this nest of democrats."

Thus we have two phases of the foreign policy of
British India. At first it has but one enemy outside
India, namely France, and it expects the attack of
this enemy only in one quarter, namely the Deccan.
In the second phase it has still the same enemy, who
works in the same way, but his power has become
far wider. He has formed, or is supposed to have
formed, relations with other Asiatic Powers outside
India. These Powers are the Afghans and the
Persians, and after the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 there
is added to these another Power, European indeed
but beginning already to overhang Asia, a Power
which is now named for the first time in the history
of British India, Russia.

This second phase is brought to an end by the fall
of Napoleon. With him fell completely, though it
woidd be rash to say finally, the influence of France
upon India. Her exclusion was secured by the
capture of the Maiu-itius in 1810 and by the reten-
tion of the island at the general peace.

There followed a pause in our foreign afi'airs.
Our Empire had no important foreign relations for
about twenty years. And then began a new phase.
Another European Power takes the place of France
as our rival in Asia. This Power is Russia.

In the whole history of Greater Britain from its
commencement at the end of Elizabeth's reign we

334 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect,

may perhaps distinguish three gi-eat periods. There
is first the seventeenth century, in which it rises
gradually from a humble position to pre-eminence
among colonial Empires. There is next that duel
with France both in America and Asia, of which I
have said so much. This occupies the eighteenth
century. But this too passed, and we have entered
upon a third phase, which, according to the fashion
of historical development, began to form itself long
before the second phase was over. In this third
phase the English world -empire has two gigantic
neighbours in the West and in the East. In the
West she has the United States and in the East
Russia for a neighbour.

These are the two States which I have cited as
examples of the modern tendency towards enormbus
political aggregations, such as would have been
impossible but for the modern inventions which
diminish the difficulties caused by time and space.
Both are continuous land-powers. Between them,
equally vast but not continuous, with the ocean flow-
ing through it in every direction, lies, like a world-
Venice, with the sea for streets, Greater Britain.

This third phase may in a sense be said to have
begun with the American Revolution, but it is more
just to consider it as dating only from about the
thirties of the present century. For the great destiny
that was reserved for the United States did not
become manifest till long after its independence was
established. That great emigration from Europe
which is the cause of its rapid progress, did not

VII INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGERS 335

begin till after the peace of 1815, and in the twenties
again its importance in the world was vastly increased
by the South American Revolution and the establish-
ment of republican government in Spanish America,
an event which placed the United States in a lofty
position of primacy on the American Continent.
Now it was about the same time that the great
extension of Russia in the East took place. The
moment when we began to feel keenly the rivalry of
Russia in the East is very plainly marked on the
history of British India. It was in 1830 that Russia
in her progress touched the Jaxartes, and soon after
she reduced Persia to a condition which we might
take to be one of practical dependence. When there-
fore in 1834, and again in 1837, Mohammed Shah of
Persia led an army into Afghanistan, we believed we
saw the hand of Russia, as thirty years before we
had seen the hand of Napoleon when any movement
took place in the same region. At this moment
begins a new and stormy period in our Indian history,
which may be said to extend to the mutiny — that is,
over twenty years. This period witnessed a series of
wars, in the course of which we conquered the whole
north-west, annexed the Punjab, Sind and Oude, and
at last aroused a disquiet in the minds of our Hindu
subjects which issued in the mutiny. These disturb-
ances seem traceable in the main to the alarm caused
by Russia. For it was this alarm which led to the
disastrous expedition into Afghanistan, and it was
in the effort to restore our damaged reputation that
the conquest of Sind was made, and it seems likely

336 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

also that if these disturbances in the north-west had
not thus been commenced, the Sikh wars might never
have happened.

"Lord Auckland, we are now very sure, did not
take the right way in 1838 to meet the danger he
foresaw. Perhaps he exaggerated the danger ; per-
haps even now, after forty years more have passed
and the advance of Eussia in Central Asia during
that time has been beyond all anticipation, we still
exaggerate the danger. But the historical sketch of
the foreign relations of India which I have given in
this lecture shows that there exists a pima facie case
for alarm, which cannot but produce a prodigious
effect. That case rests upon the simple fact that
our three predecessors in the Empire of India, the
Mahrattas in 1761, the Moguls in 1738, the older
Mussulman Empire in 1398, all alike received a
mortal blow from a Power which suddenly invaded
India through Afghanistan, and that, on two other
occasions quite distinct from these, invaders from
Afghanistan, viz. Mahmoud of Ghazni and Baber,
have founded Empires in India.

I call this a prima facie case for alarm. It is
nothing more. Such reasonings per enumerationem
simplicem can establish only that there is ground for
instituting an examination, though unfortunately
when history is brought to bear at all upon politics,
which happens but rarely, it is commonly done in
this random way. We cannot argue from the Moguls
and Nadir Shah to the English and Russia. It would
be easy perhaps to show that the Mogul Empire never

ni INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGERS 337

had a solidity at all approaching that of the English
Empire, and we might point out also that when
Nadir Shah came to Delhi the Empire had already-
been in manifest decay for thirty years. With re-
spect to Russia, on the other hand, it would be easy
to show that it is a Power wholly different in kind
from those Powers, generally more or less Tartar,
which have invaded India, — a Power certainly far
greater and more solid than most of them, but still
so different that we cannot assume it to be equally
capable of invasion and conquest at a prodigious
distance. In short, history proves nothing more than
that the way to India lies through Afghanistan.
Whether a Power such as Russia can successfully
attack by this route a Power such as British India,
is a question upon which historical precedents throw
no light whatever. It can be answered only by
analysing and estimating the military resources, both
moral and material, of the two Powers.

But it may be asked, How is it possible to question
Russia's power or her will to make distant conquests ?
Has she not conquered in the North the whole breadth
of Asia, and in the centre has she not penetrated
to Samarcand and Khokand? What Power ever
equalled her in successful aggression 1 But we must
pronounce no man happy, Solon said, till we have
seen his end. Can such a career continue indefinitely,
when Russia shall have been thoroughly Europeanised
at home? As soon as her political awakening is
complete, must not a transformation of her foreign
policy take place 1

z

338 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

On the other hand it may be said, Who can ques-
tion the ability of England to contend with Russia 1
But as I have argued, England is very distinct from
British India. Russia may be rich enough to conquer
vast regions at a distance of thousands of miles, but
England is not. British India must in the main
defend herself — that is, she can have English troops,
but she must pay for them.

We must ask then. What is the inherent strength
of British India? And thus its stability depends
upon its being strong enough to withstand those in-
ternal dangers I spoke of, complicated with the ex-
ternal danger from Afghanistan. We were able to
put down the mutiny, and perhaps we could defeat
a Russian army of invasion. But what if a mutiny
and a Russian invasion came together 1 What if our
native army, in some fit of disaffection or in some
vague hope of profiting by a change, should prefer
the Russian service to the English? This is the
danger which since about 1830 has been foreseen.
The Government can hold its own within and also
without. But it has little strength to spare, and
must guard itself anxiously against any coalition
between its domestic and its foreign enemies.

Other combinations may be imagined which would
be extremely dangerous. Thus it is sometimes
argued that sooner or later avo must lose India,
because sooner or later some war in Europe will force
us to withdraw our English troops. It is true that
without those troops we cannot keep India, and yet
some great sudden attack upon ourselves, such as an

VII INTERNAL AND EXTEKNAL DANGERS 339

invasion of England, might compel us to send for
them. It is however also true that such a danger is
not at present to be foreseen, for what enemy could
invade us but France 1 Now sixty-eight years have
passed since we last fought the French; our old
hostility to France has become a matter of ancient
history ; and the aggressive power of France has
much declined.

But the subject is too large for the space I am able
to give to it, and I must ask you to be content with
this imperfect outline.

LECTURE VIII

RECAPITULATION

We have now dwelt for a long time on that extra-
ordinary expansion which has had the effect that,
considered as a state, England has left Europe
altogether behind it and become a world-state, while,
considered purely as a nation — that is, as speaking a
certain language — she has furnished out two world-
states, which vie with each other in vigour, influence,
and rapidity of growth. We have inquired into the
causes, traced the process, and considered some of
the results of this expansion. It remains then in
this closing lecture to gather up the impressions we
have received into a general conclusion.

There are two schools of opinion among us with
respect to our Empire, of which schools the one may
be called the bombastic and the other the pessimistic.
The one is lost in wonder and ecstasy at its immense
dimensions, and at the energy and heroism which
presumably have gone to the making of it; this
school therefore advocates the maintenance of it as a

LECT, vill KECAPITULATION 341

point of honour or sentiment. The other is in the
opposite extreme, regards it as founded in aggression
and rapacity, as useless and burdensome, a kind of
excrescence upon England, as depriving us of the
advantages of our insularity and exposing us to wars
and quarrels in every part of the globe ; this school
therefore advocates a policy which may lead at the
earliest possible opportunity to the abandonment of
it. Let us consider then how our studies, now that
they are concluded, have led us to regard these two
opposite opinions.

We have been led to take a much more sober view
of the Empire than would satisfy the bombastic
school. At the outset we are not much impressed
with its vast extent, because we know no reason in
the nature of things why a state should be any the
better for being large, and because throughout the
greater part of history very large states have usually
been states of a low type. Nor again can we imagine
why it should be our duty to maintain our Empire
for an indefinite time simply out of respect for the
heroism of those who won it for us, or because the
abandonment of it might seem to betray a want of
spirit. All political unions exist for the good of their
members, and should be just as large, and no larger,
as they can be without ceasing to be beneficial. It
would seem to us insane that if the connection with
the colonies or with India hampered both parties, if
it did harm rather than good, England should resolve
to maintain it to her own detriment and to that of
her dependencies. We find too a confusion of ideas

342 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.

hidden under much of the bombastic language of this
school, for they seem to conceive of the dependencies
of England as of so much property belonging to her,
as if the Queen were like some Sesostris or Solomon
of the ancient world, to whom "Tarshish and the
isles brought presents, Arabia and Sheba offered
gifts " ; whereas the connection is really not of this
kind at all, and England is not, directly at least, any
the richer for it And further we have ventured to
doubt that the vastness of this Empire necessarily
proves some invincible heroism or supernatural genius
for government in our nation. Undoubtedly some
facts may be adduced to show natural aptitude for
colonisation and a faculty of leadership in our race.
A good number of Englishmen may be cited who
have exerted an almost magical ascendency over the
minds of the native races of India ; and in Canada
again, where the English settlers have competed
directly with the French, they have shown a marked
superiority in enterprise and energy. But though
there is much to admire in the history of Greater
Britain, yet the pre-eminence of England in the New
World has certainly not been won by sheer natural
superiority. In the heroic age of maritime discovery
we did not greatly shine. We did not show the
genius of the Portuguese, and we did not produce a
Columbus or a Magelhaen. When I examined the
causes which enabled us after two centuries to surpass
other nations in colonisation, I found that we had a
broader basis and a securer position at home than
Portugal and Holland, and that we were less involved

vm RECAPITULATION 343

in great European enterprises than France and Spain.
In like manner Avhen I inquired how we could con-
quer, and that with little trouble, the vast country of
India, I found that after all we did it by means
mainly of Indian troops, to whom we imparted a
skill which was not so much English as European,
that the French showed us the way, and that the
condition of the country was such as to render it
peculiarly open to conquest.

Thus I admitted very much of what is urged
by the pessimists against the bombastic school. I
endeavoured to judge the Empire by its own intrinsic
merits, and to see it as it is, not concealing the incon-
veniences which may attend such a vast expansion, or
the dangers to which it may expose us, nor finding
any compensation for these in the notion that there
is something intrinsically glorious in an Empire " upon
which the sun never sets," or, to use another equally
brilliant expression, an Empire " whose morning
drum-beat, following the sun and keeping company
with the hours, encircles the globe with an unbroken
chain of martial airs." But though there is little that
is glorious in most of the great Empires mentioned
in history, since they have usually been created by
force and have remained at a low level of political
life, we observed that Greater Britain is not in the
ordinary sense an Empire at all. Looking at the
colonial part of it alone, we see a natural growth, a
mere normal extension of the English race into other
lands, which for the most part were so thinly peopled
that our settlers took possession of them without

344 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

conquest. If there is nothing highly glorious in such
an expansion, there is at the same time nothing forced
or unnatural about it. It creates not properly an
Empire, but only a very large state. So far as the
expansion itself is concerned, no one does or can
regard it but with pleasiire. For a nation to have an
outlet for its superfluous population is one of the
greatest blessings. Population unfortunately does
not adapt itself to space ; on the contrary, the larger
it is the larger is its yearly increment. Now that
Great Britain is already full it becomes fuller with
increased speed ; it gains a million every three years.
Probably emigration ought to proceed at a far greater
rate than it does, and assuredly the greatest evils
would arise if it were checked. But should there be
an expansion of the State as well as of the nation 1
" No," say the pessimists, " or only till the colony is
giown-up and ready for independence." When a
metaphor comes to be regarded as an argument, what
an irresistible argument it always seems ! I have
suggested that in the modern world distance has very
much lost its effect, and that there are signs of a time
when states will be vaster than they have hitherto
been. In ancient times emigrants from Greece to
Sicily took up their independence at once, and in
those parts there were almost as many states as cities.
In the eighteenth century Burke thought a federation
quite impossible across the Atlantic Ocean. In such
times the metaphor of the grown-up son might well
harden into a convincing demonstration. But since
Burke's time the Atlantic Ocean has shrunk till it

viii RECAPITULATION 345

seems scarcely broader than the sea between Greece
and Sicily. Why then do we not drop the metaphor 1
I have urged that we are unconsciously influenced by
a historic parallel which when examined turns out to
be inapplicable. As indeed it is true generally that
one urgent reason why politicians should study history
is that they may guard themselves against the false
historical analogies which continually mislead those
who do not study history ! These views are founded
on the American Revolution, and yet the American
Revolution arose out of circumstances and out of a
condition of the world which has long since passed
away. England Avas then an agricultural country by
no means thickly peopled ; America was full of
religious refugees animated by ideas which in England
had lately passed out of fashion ; there was scarcely
any flux and reflux of population between the two
countries, and the ocean divided them with a gulf
which seemed as unbridgeable as that moral gulf
which separates an Englishman from a Frenchman.
Even then the separation was not eff"ected without a
great wrench. It is true that both countries have
prospered since, nevertheless they have had a second
war and may have a third, and it is wholly an illusion
to suppose that their prosperity has been caused or
promoted by their separation. At any rate all the
conditions of the world are altered now. The great
causes of division, oceans and religious disabilities,
have ceased to operate. Vast uniting forces have
begun to work, trade and emigi-ation. Meanwhile
the natural ties which unite Englishmen resume their

346 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

influence as soon as the counteracting pressure is
removed — I mean tlie ties of nationality, language, and
religion. The mother-country having once for all
ceased to be a stepmother, and to make unjust
claims and impose annoying restrictions, and since
she wants her colonies as an outlet both for popula-
tion and trade, and since on the other hand the
colonies must feel that there is risk, not to say also
intellectual impoverishment, in independence, — since
finally intercourse is ever increasing and no alienating
force is at work to counteract it, but the discords
created by the old system pass more and more into
oblivion, — it seems possible that our colonial Empire
so-called may more and more deserve to be called
Greater Britain, and that the tie may become stronger
and stronger. Then the seas which divide us might
be forgotten, and that ancient preconception, which
leads us always to think of ourselves as belonging to
a single island, might be rooted out of our minds. If
in this way we moved sensibly nearer in our thoughts
and feelings to the colonies, and accustomed ourselves
to think of emigrants as not in any way lost to
England by settling in the colonies, the result might
be, first that emigration on a vast scale might become
our remedy for pauperism, and secondly that some
organisation might gradually be arrived at which
might make the whole force of the Empire available
in time of war.

In taking this view I have borne in mind the
example of the United States. It is curious that the
pessimists among ourselves should generally have

VIII RECAPITULATION 347

been admirers of the United States, and yet there we
have the most striking example of confident and
successful expansion. Those colonies which, when
they parted from us, did but fringe the Atlantic
sea-board, and had but lately begun to push their
settlements into the valley of the Ohio, how steadily,
how boundlessly, and with what steadfast seK-reliance
have they advanced since ! They have covered with
their States or Territories, first the mighty Mississippi
valley, next the Rocky Mountains, and lastly the
Pacific coast. They have made no difiiculty of
absorbing all this territory ; it has not shaken their
political system. And yet they have never said, as
among us even those who are not pessimists say of
the colonies, that if they wish to secede, of course
they can do so. On the contrary they have firmly
denied this right, and to maintain the unity of their
vast state have sacrificed blood and treasure in un-
exampled profusion. They fii-mly refused to allow
their Union to be broken up, or to listen to the
argument that a state is none the better for being
very large.

Perhaps we are hardly alive to the vast results
which are flowing in politics from modern mechanism.
Throughout the greater part of human history the
process of state-building has been governed by strict
conditions of space. For a long time no high organ-
isation was possible except in very small states. In
antiquity the good states were usually cities, and
Rome herself when she became an Empire was obliged
to adopt a lower organisation. In medieval Europe,

348 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

states sprang up which were on a larger scale than
those of antiquity, but for a long time these too were
lower organisms and looked up to Athens and Rome
with reverence as to the homes of political greatness.
But through the invention of the representative
system these states have risen to a higher level. We
now see states with vivid political consciousness on
territories of two hundred thousand square miles and
in populations of thirty millions. A further advance
is now being made. The federal system has been
added to the representative system, and at the same
time steam and electricity have been introduced.
From these improvements has resulted the possibility
of highly organised states on a yet larger scale. Thus
Eussia in Europe has already a population of near
eighty millions on a territory of more than two
millions of square miles, and the United States
will have by the end of the century a population as
large upon a territory of four millions of square miles.
We cannot, it is true, yet speak of Russia as having a
high type of organisation ; she has her trials and her
transformation to come; but the Union has shown
herself able to combine free institutions in the fullest
degree with boundless expansion.

Now if it offends us to hear our Empire described
in the language of Oriental bombast, we need not
conclude that the Empire itself is in fault, for it is
open to us to think that it has been wrongly classified.
Instead of comparing it to that which it resembles in
no degree, some Turkish or Persian congeries of
nations forced together by a conquering horde, let us

VIII RECAPITULATION 349

compare it to the United States, and we shall see at
once that, so far from being of an obsolete type, it is
precisely the sort of union which the conditions of
the time most naturally call into existence.

Lastly, let us observe that the question, whether
large states or small states are best, is not one which
can be answered or ought to be discussed absolutely.
We often hear abstract panegyrics upon the happiness
of small states. But observe that a small state
among small states is one thing, and a small state
among large states quite another. Nothing is more
delightful than to read of the bright days of Athens
and Florence, but those bright days lasted only so
long as the states with which Athens and Florence
had to do were states on a similar scale of magnitude.
Both states sank at once as soon as large country-
states of consolidated strength grew up in their
neighbourhood. The lustre of Athens grew pale as
soon as Macedonia rose, and Charles V. speedily
brought to an end the great days of Florence. Now
if it be true that a larger type of state than any
hitherto known is springing up in the world, is not
this a serious consideration for those states which
rise only to the old level of magnitude? Russia
already presses somewhat heavily on Central Europe ;
what will she do when with her vast territory and
population she equals Germany in intelligence and
organisation, when all her railways are made, her
people educated, and her government settled on a
solid basis ? — and let us remember that if we allow
her half a century to make so much progress her

350 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.

population will at the end of that time be not eighty
but nearly a hundred and sixty millions. At that
time which many here present may live to see,
Russia and the United States will surpass in power
the states now called great as much as the great
country-states of the sixteenth century surpassed
Florence. Is not this a serious consideration, and is
it not especially so for a state like England, which
has at the present moment the choice in its hands
between two courses of action, the one of which
may set it in that future age on a level with the
greatest of these great states of the future, while
the other will reduce it to the level of a purely
European Power looking back, as Spain does now, to
the .great days when she pretended to be a world-
state.

But what I have been saying does not apply to
India. If England and her colonies taken together
make, properly speaking, not an Empire but only a
very large state, this is because the population is
English throughout and the institutions are of the
same kind. In India the population is wholly foreign,
and the institutions wholly unlike our own. India
is reallj'^ an Empire and an Oriental Empire. It is in
relation to India especially that the language of the
bombastic school oflFends us, and that we are struck
by the misconception which is betrayed in their
high-flown imagery borrowed from the ancient world.
And here we cannot, on looking more closely into
the phenomenon, reconcile ourselves to it by dis-
covering that, though it has not the romantic great-

VIII RECAPITULATION 351

ness attributed to it, yet it has a solid value and
utility to us which is of another kind altogether.

Gradually and in recent times a great trade
between India and England has sprung up, but even
this, as I pointed out, was hardly contemplated by
those who had the principal share in founding the
Indian Empire. And it is diflScult to see what other
great advantages we reap from it, so that we ask
ourselves in some perplexity, what made us take the
trouble of acquiring it. Historically the answer is,
that in our great colonial struggle with France we
were led into wars which left us in possession of
territories in the neighbourhood of Calcutta and
Madras, that we then proceeded to organise our
government of them, that we successfully purged
away the corruption which had sprung up in the first
period of conquest, and created an administration
that was pure and under the direct control of the
Government at home ; but that afterwards there
arose a line of Governors-General who on high
grounds of statesmanship were favourable to annexa-
tion. The policy now adopted was not sordid, but it
may have been ambitious and unscrupulous. If we
are to think, as Mr. Torrens ^ imagines, that Pitt and
Lord Wellesley in secret deliberation determined to
replace the American colonies by an Eastern Empire,
such an idea, according to the view taken in these
lectures, belongs to an unsound and chimerical system
of politics. But ostensibly the policy was fustified
by arguments chiefly of a philanthropic kind, and
1 Tlie Marquis Wellesley, by W. M. Torrens, M.P., vol. i. p. 128,

352 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.

they were arguments of such strength that it was
difficult to resist them. It was not to be denied
that a most deplorable anarchy reigned in India.
Here and there a tyranny arose which had some
degree of stability, though it was almost always a
military government of the lowest type. But over
the greater part of India there prevailed a system
which it would be appropriate to call, not govern-
ment of a low type, but robbery of a high type.
Occasionally in Europe, as in some Highland clans
or among the Western buccaneers, or those ancient
pirates of the Mediterranean whom Pompey was
commissioned to suppress, robber-bands have had
almost the magnitude and organisation of states, but
they never have reached the scale of the robber-states
of India. The Mahrattas levied their chout, a sort of
blackmail, all over India, and at a later time the
Pindarrees surpassed the Mahrattas in cruelty. Now
this anarchy arose directly out of the decline of the
authority of the Great Mogul. It was possible of
course for the English to wash their hands of all this,
to defend their own territories, and let the chaos
welter as it would outside their frontier. But to
Governors-General on the spot such a course might
easily seem not just but simply cruel. Aggrandise-
ment might present itself in the light of a simple
duty, when it seemed that by extending our Empire
the reign of robbery and murder might be brought to
an end in a moment, and that of law commence.^

1 " It is a proud phrase to use, but it is a true one, that we liave
bestowed blessings upon millions . . . The ploughman is again in

VIII RECAPITULATION 353

A.ccordingly Lord Wellesley laid it do^vn that there
had always been a paramount Power in India, that
such a paramount Power was necessary to the
country, and that it became the duty of the Company,
now that the power of the Mogul had come to an
end, to save India by assuming his function.

And thus we founded our Empire, partly it may
be out of an empty ambition of conquest and partly
out of a philanthropic desire to put an end to
enormous evils. But, whatever our motives might
be, we incurred vast responsibilities, which were
compensated by no advantages. We have now
acquired a great Indian trade, but even this we
purchase at the expense of a perpetual dread of
Russia, and of all movements in the Mussulman
world, and of all changes in Egypt. Thus a review
of the history of British India leaves on the mind an
impression quite different from that which our
Colonial Empire produces. The latter has grown up
naturally, out of the operation of the plainest causes ;
the former seems to have sprung from a romantic
adventure ; it is highly interesting, striking, and
curious, but difficult to understand or to form an
opinion about. We may hope that it will lead to
good, but hitherto we have not ourselves reaped
directly much good from it.

I have shown you however that, though it may be
called an Oriental Empire, it is much less dangerous

every quarter turning up a soil which had for many seasons never
been stirred except by the hoofs of predatory cavalry." Lord
Hastings, February 1819.

2a

354 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.

to US than that description might seem to imply. It
is not an Empire attached to England in the same
way as the Roman Empire was attached to Rome ; it
will not drag us down, or infect us at home with
Oriental notions or methods of government. Nor is
it an Empire which costs us money or hampers our
finances. It is self-supporting, and is held at arm's
length in such a way that our destiny is not very
closely entangled with its own.

Next I have led you to consider what may be the
effect of our Indian Empire upon India itself. We
perhaps have not gained much from it; but has
India gained ? On this question I have desired to
speak with great diffidence. I have asserted con-
fidently only thus much, that no greater experiment
has ever been tried on the globe, and that the efi"ects
of it will be comparable to the efiect of the Roman
Empire upon the nations of Europe — nay, probably
they will be much greater. This means no doubt
that vast benefits will be done to India, but it does
not necessarily mean that great mischiefs may not
also be done. Nay, if you ask on which side the
balance will incline, and whether, if we succeed in
bringing India into the full current of European
civilisation, we shaU not evidently be rendering her
the greatest possible service, I should only answer,
"I hope so; I trust so." In the academic study of
these vast questions Ave should take care to avoid the
optimistic commonplaces of the newspaper. Our
Western civilisation is perhaps not absolutely the
glorious thing we like to imagine it. Those who

VIII RECAPITULATION 355

watch India most impartially see that a vast trans-
formation goes on there, but sometimes it produces
a painful impression upon them ; they see much
destroyed, bad things and good things together ;
sometimes they doubt whether they see many good
things called into existence. But they see one
enormous improvement, under which we may fairly
hope that all other improvements are potentially
included ; they see anarchy and plunder brought to
an end and something like the immensa majestas
Romanae pacis established among two hundred and
fifty millions of human beings.

Another thing almost all observers see, and that
is that the experiment must go forward, and that we
cannot leave it unfinished if we would. For here too
the great uniting forces of the age are at work ;
England and India are drawn every year for good or
for evil more closely together. Not indeed that dis-
uniting forces might not easily spring up, not that
our rule itself may not possibly be calling out forces
which may ultimately tend to disruption, nor yet that
the Empire is altogether free from the danger of a
sudden catastrophe. But for the present we are
driven both by necessity and duty to a closer union.
Already we should ourselves suflfer greatly from dis-
ruption, and the longer the union lasts the more
important it will become to us. Meanwhile the same
is true in an infinitely greater degree of India itself
The transformation we are making there may cause
us some misgivings, but though wc may be led con-
ceivably to wish that it had never been begun, nothing

356 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LBOT.

could ever convince us that it ought to be broken off
in the middle.

Altogether I hope that our long course of medita-
tion upon the expansion of England may have led
you to feel that there is something fantastic in all
those notions of abandoning the colonies or abandon-
ing India, which are so freely broached among us.
Have we really so much power over the march of
events as we suppose 1 Can we cancel the growth of
centuries for a whim, or because, when we throw a
hasty glance at it, it does not suit our fancies 1 The
lapse of time and the force of life, " which working
strongly binds," limit our freedom more than we
know, and even when we are not conscious of it at all.
It is true that we in England have never accustomed
our imaginations to the thought of Greater Britain.
Our politicians, our historians still think of England
not of Greater Britain as their country ; they still
think only that England has colonies, and they allow
themselves to talk as if she could easily Avhistle them
off, and become again with perfect comfort to herself
the old solitary island of Queen Elizabeth's time, " in
a great pool a swan's nest." But the fancy is but a
chimera produced by inattention, one of those
monsters — for such monsters there are — which are
created not by imagination but by the want of
imagination !

But though this is a conclusion to which I am led,
it is not the conclusion which I wish to leave most
strongly impressed on your minds. What I desire
here is not so much to impart to you a just view of

VIII RECAPITULATION 357

practical politics, as a just view of the object and
method of historical study. My chief aim in these
lectures has been to show in what light the more
recent history of England ought to be regarded by
the student. It seems to me that most of our
historians, when they come to those modern periods,
lose the clue, betray embarrassment in the choice of
topics, and end by producing a story without a moral.
I have argued in the first place that history is con-
cerned, not mainly with the interesting things which
may have been done by Englishmen or in England,
but with England herself considered as a nation and
a state. To make this more plain I have narrated
nothing, told no thrilling stories, drawn no heroic
portraits ; I have kept always before you England as
a great whole. In her story there is little that is
dramatic, for she can scarcely die, and in this period
at least has not suffered or been in danger of suffer-
ing much. What great changes has she undergone
in this period? Considerable political changes no
doubt, but none that have been so memorable as
those she underwent in the seventeenth century.
Then she made one of the greatest political dis-
coveries, and taught all the world how liberty might
be adapted to the conditions of a nation-state. On
the other hand the modern political movement, that
of Reform or Liberalism, began not in England but
on the Continent, from whence we borrowed it. The
peculiarly English movement, I have urged, in this
period has been an unparalleled expansion. Grasp
this fact, and you have the clue both to the eighteenth

358 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.

and the nineteenth centuries. The wars with France
from Louis XIV. to Napoleon fall into an intelligible
series. The American Revolution and the conquest
of India cease to seem mere digressions and take
their proper places in the main line of English history.
The growth of wealth, commerce, and manufacture,
the fall of the old colonial system and the gradual
growth of a new one, are all easily included under
the same formula. Lastly this formula binds to-
gether the past of England and her future, and leaves
us, when we close the history of our country, not
with minds fatigued and bewildered as though from
reading a story that has been too much spun out,
but enlightened and more deeply interested than ever,
because partly prepared for what is to come next.

I am often told by those who, like myself, study
the question how history should be taught, Oh, you
must before all things make it interesting ! I agree
with them in a certain sense, but I give a different
sense to the word interesting — a sense which after all
is the original and proper one. By interesting they
mean romantic, poetical, surprising ; I do not try to
make history interesting in this sense, because I have
found that it cannot be done without adulterating
history and mixing it %vith falsehood. But the word
interesting does not properly mean romantic. That
is interesting in the proper sense which affects our
interests, which closely concerns us and is deeply im-
portant to us. I have tried to show you that the
history of modern England from the beginning of
the eighteenth centiu-y is interesting in this sense,

viii • RECAPITULATION 359

because it is pregnant with great results which will
affect the lives of ourselves and our children and the
future greatness of our country. Make history inter-
esting indeed ! I cannot make history more interest-
ing than it is, except by falsifying it. And therefore
when I meet a person who does not find history inter-
esting, it does not occur to me to alter history, — I try
to alter him.

THE END

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